Member Reports, continued:
From Rich Asarisi:
My Comet NEOWISE Adventures
When I saw the reports online about this comet being visible to us in the northern hemisphere I was truly excited. Since it’s been more than a few years since we’ve seen one put on a decent show for us, I started looking at the information to find where and when it was going to be visible and plan where I was going to go to see it and photograph it.
On July 14th with the comet being in the NNW at about 20 degrees elevation I decided that the best place to try and find this comet was the Silvermine industrial park in Seymour, about 2 miles from my house and up on the top of a hill. With my binoculars and camera along with my wife Martha we set out about 8:45 to see if we could locate this dirty snowball. Try as we might, we never did locate it that night, mostly due to the clouds that created a soup low in the northwest right around sunset, of course the rest of the sky was clear.
If at first you don’t succeed… so on the 15th we decided to try again, this time we had Pat Maturo join us for the hunt at the Mathis baseball field at the top of hill in the industrial park. Due to most events being canceled the park was empty and we had the place to ourselves, except for the Osprey that kept watch over us there trying to figure out what the Hoomans were doing below their nest. Again the comet was forecast to be 20 degrees above the horizon and again we didn’t have any success in locating it.
So a bit discouraged I went home and investigated more about where other people were seeing it and tried to ascertain how high and what elevation they were seeing it from. I came to the conclusion that it should indeed be visible from the location I had been at for the last 2 nights. The forecast for the 16th didn’t look promising so I decided that it would be Friday night now to find the visitor to our solar system.
On Friday I made everything ready in plenty of time and had SkySafari checked and double checked, skies looked like they would be clear and now the comet was forecast to be a bit higher in the sky. I set out about 8:45 to the same baseball field and grabbed the camera and set it up, about 9:15 I searched the sky with my binoculars but didn’t locate the comet, I decided that perhaps there is not enough contrast to pick it up in the bino’s let me take a couple shots with the camera. So with the Nikon D4 and 70-200mm lens set at about 80mm I pointed it at the sky in the NNW. Once I nailed the focus and the approximate location I took a few shots and pulled them up on the screen to review. Ha! It was there!! Much higher than I thought it would be, and much brighter then I expected. It pretty much jumped off the LCD screen of the camera. I took over a few hundred shots of the comet that night trying different settings and focal lengths to try and get the best exposure. When I got home and actually reviewed the images I found the best ones were from after 10pm when the sky was starting to turn black. So armed with this knowledge I knew I had to get the best shots after dark. Knowing how high the comet was I pretty much determined that it should be above the tree line from my front yard.
Saturday the 18th I took sky safari and went to live mode to figure out where the comet would be in my NNW sky, from my front yard it cleared the tree line without an issue. Once it got dark I set up my camera on the front lawn and set the intervalometer to take the shots for me automatically, so all I had to do was sit there and wait for it. While the camera was clicking away I used my binoculars to check out the comet. Once the sky got dark it was possible to see it naked eye and the binos showed it had 2 tails streaming from it. Another few hundred images later I called it a night. The comet wasn’t high enough to get it in my Planewave or I would have done that instead. Using my D4 on a tripod with no tracking makes for short exposures. But I did okay with what I had to work with.
The final shots I got were on Monday July 20th, since my wife was away for a few days, she still hadn’t seen it so I took her outside and with my laser pointer showed her exactly where it was. I set up the camera to run on auto again and a few hundred shots later I called it a night. This was a lot of fun to plan and shoot, but I do think my Nikon D4 is a little long in the tooth now and in need of an upgrade. I think I might also look for a tracker or a small tracking mount to put my lenses on for longer exposures.