Comet

Well, he was using an SLR, which is pretty amateurish for a professor from MIT, even if it was digital. Either way, digital or film, he would have to carefully set up the camera for each shot. In order to get anything other than pretty pictures, he should have had a liquid cooled CCD, and several other instruments attached, and run the whole thing from a computer with quite a bit of memory, like a RAID. That way, it can be set up and pretty much left on its own while he pursues other heavenly bodies.