Back in October, this comet made an appearance first in the morning sky (though weather and circumstance prevented me from seeing it then), then in the evening sky. Finding this comet to take pictures was a challenge from Brooklyn. Anything astronomy is a challenge from Brooklyn. The first day with reasonable weather to see it in the evening was Oct 12; the sky was mostly clear, but it was low on the horizon and a race between darkness and the comet getting lost in the haze over New Jersey and Staten Island (my view from Bay Ridge) and I wasn’t really prepared for pictures, but it was bright enough to capture with my cell phone and, once you knew where to look, it was actually detectable naked eye!
There are two images below. There is a 100% scale crop from the cell phone propped against a fence rail to try to catch that smudge. Yeah, you can see that comet, right? I did say detectable not really obvious at all. The second used the optical zoom (a mere 2X) from the phone and the comet pops out a bit better.
Not great, but I was excited that it was bright enough for this and was lookng forward to trying to get pictures of the next few days hoping it wouldn’t fade too fast. Visible in the camera, visible in binoculars, and detectible by the nake eye, time to plan to come back the next day… but of course, it was cloudy for the next three nights.
This next image is a single frame from the cell phone on Oct 16, noticeably later in the evening so the sky is dark, from near the same location. This is cropped, but the scale is 1/3 the original. On this evening, I couldn’t pick out the comet against the sky glow, and we spent a long time searching, along with several others who had come out with cameras or binoculars to try to find the comet. I was starting to think it had faded too much and was going to give up when someone spotted it. The comet had moved further south than I was expected, though I suspect part of the issue was that we had moved 1/2 mile further south to view and I was comparing landmarks from four days earlier.
Definitely visible in a short cell-phone shot even if still underwhelming. Here’s a crop at 100%.
Once I had the DSLR pointed at the comet, I set up the intervalometer to just keep taking pictures, occasionally recentering the comment since I had gone out with just the camera and a tripod. But that’s going to be another, more technical post.
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