This is the famous green comet, comet C/2022 E3 ZTF, sporting two tails! The tail pointing to the right is the comet’s actual ion tail and points away from the Sun.
The tail pointing to the left is the comet’s anti-tail, and is pointing toward the Sun. The anti-tail is actually an optical illusion caused by Earth passing through the comet’s orbital plane, so this is indeed a rare sight that I was lucky enough to capture.
I processed this image by separating out the comet and then aligning on it to get a sharp image of the comet, and then processed the stars to get a sharp image of the stars and then combined the two images. The result is sharp stars and a sharp comet.
If you own PixInsight, I go into the detailed steps about how to process an image like this in this article at my other website.
You can capture and process images like this with my free eBook about capturing and processing astro photos!
