Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)

[Craney]

33 minutes ago, John said:

It might not be Hale-Bopp II but it's the best over the past 7 years ... so well worth discussion and reporting.....

 

Absolutely right.    From UK skies the planets are not favourable at the moment.  The Sun is quite.  There is not much astro dark around for the Northern latitudes. The weather is generally cloudy  and wet ...err Summer?!!.   The Moon spends too much of its time 'almost' full and not that interesting..... and don't mention encroaching light pollution and StarLink.......

Let's celebrate the fact we have a rare and noteworthy celestial event.  

" We choose to observe the comet in this week and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; " 

[Graham Darke]

I tried to spot it between 3.15 and 3.30. It was nice and clear to the North so I took my binoculars down to the end of the street where I had a clearer view and scanned for 15 minutes. Nothing seen. Don’t know if my sky was too bright by this time to see it or if it was still too low ( I reckon I could see down to 5 degrees above horizon) but very surprised not to even see the coma. I could see Capella clearly and Venus too but no comet. May try again tomorrow. 

[Davey-T]

7 minutes ago, Graham Darke said:

I tried to spot it between 3.15 and 3.30. It was nice and clear to the North so I took my binoculars down to the end of the street where I had a clearer view and scanned for 15 minutes. Nothing seen. Don’t know if my sky was too bright by this time to see it or if it was still too low ( I reckon I could see down to 5 degrees above horizon) but very surprised not to even see the coma. I could see Capella clearly and Venus too but no comet. May try again tomorrow. 

It is tricky to spot in the lightening sky, easy to sweep past it, but once you find it it's pretty obvious or at least it was the night before

Dave

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

11 minutes ago, Graham Darke said:

I tried to spot it between 3.15 and 3.30. It was nice and clear to the North so I took my binoculars down to the end of the street where I had a clearer view and scanned for 15 minutes. Nothing seen. Don’t know if my sky was too bright by this time to see it or if it was still too low ( I reckon I could see down to 5 degrees above horizon) but very surprised not to even see the coma. I could see Capella clearly and Venus too but no comet. May try again tomorrow. 

For me, 3:15 was near optimal, and I did manage to find it, but that translates to 2:15 or a bit later UK time. At 3:30 it was getting a bit light already and the comet looked paler. I would guess 4:15 here would be close to the time you observed, and the comet was definitely not visible here anymore

[John]

The "window" of visibility is quite short between the time it rises and when dawning light overcomes it. It's not a daylight comet yet !

 

[Pixies]

4 minutes ago, John said:

The "window" of visibility is quite short between the time it rises and when dawning light overcomes it. It's not a daylight comet yet !

 

For me, it was vanishing from binocular view (10x50), 90 minutes before sunrise.  Sunrise here at 4:40am this morning

[Graham Darke]

This is what CO is giving me for the early hours of tomorrow which is very similar to this morning‘s forecast so fingers crossed...

[John]

CO is telling me that I have "red" and 100% cloud cover for  the next 24 hours so I won't need to set my alarm 

[kerrylewis]

10 minutes ago, John said:

CO is telling me that I have "red" and 100% cloud cover for  the next 24 hours so I won't need to set my alarm 

Me too unfortunately . If forecasts are correct Saturday morning is the next opportunity 

[Craney]

I can overcome tiredness,  low altitude,  streetlights....    but the weather !!!!....... oh dear.....

...  Atypical for July.  to say the least....

Patience,Craney...patience !!!!

[happy-kat]

For some reason the vintage takumar lens isn't focusing to infinity...argh... I'll have you see if I've got to fiddle with it

[Littleguy80]

Had a go at stacking some images taken through my 10" dob this morning. There was a bit low light cloud around at the time. I think it came out alright though.

[Tenor Viol]

5 hours ago, kerrylewis said:

Me too unfortunately . If forecasts are correct Saturday morning is the next opportunity 

Solid red until Friday morning - hope it doesn't change

[John]

27 minutes ago, Littleguy80 said:

Had a go at stacking some images taken through my 10" dob this morning. There was a bit low light cloud around at the time. I think it came out alright though.

That looks great Neil - some nice detail of the tail structure.

I'd like to try the same next time I age a chance - could you let me know the approach you used ?

I know practically nothing about astro imaging I ought to say !

[Littleguy80]

On 06/07/2020 at 19:48, Davey-T said:

A clever person could image Neowise, Venus and the ISS in the same frame about 3.15am tonight 

May need a 20mm lens

Dave

Well Dave, this is the best I could manage. Used my Samyang 14mm Lens. I’ve got the ISS, Venus and with a lot of zooming I could just see Neowise through the clouds. If nothing else it’ll serve as a nice reminder of my observing location. 
 

[Littleguy80]

7 minutes ago, John said:

That looks great Neil - some nice detail of the tail structure.

I'd like to try the same next time I age a chance - could you let me know the approach you used ?

I know practically nothing about astro imaging I ought to say !

Thanks John. I'm new to imaging too. I'll try to give you all the little tips I've picked up so far. Connected the camera to my dob via a T-Ring. I focus using live view on the camera lcd and setting the zoom on the lcd to 10x. I was using Capella to get the focus sharp. I set my camera to stack 10 consecutive images. For processing, I use a Mac so I used software called Siril to stack the images. I think on Windows, Deep Sky Stacker is the recommended best free option. I then used Affinity Photo to crop, adjust contrast, highlights/shadows and curves to bring out the comet as much as possible. I've been using Affinity Photo since Dave Eagle's talk on here. I bought the guide he produced for using Affinity Photo to process astro images. I'm not very scientific  with it at this stage. Just fiddle around with it until I getting looking about right. Hope that's of some use!

[John]

Thanks very much for sharing that Neil. I think I can try and tread in your footsteps with the gear I have. It's the processing that I get foxed by

Please don't tell anyone on here though - they will think I'm getting interested in imaging and we can't have that !

 

[Littleguy80]

3 minutes ago, John said:

Thanks very much for sharing that Neil. I think I can try and tread in your footsteps with the gear I have. It's the processing that I get foxed by

Please don't tell anyone on here though - they will think I'm getting interested in imaging and we can't have that !

 

Your secret is safe with me, John

The processing is really tricky. The best advice I can give is to follow some online guides to get an idea of which tools to use. After that just experiment a bit. I posted a Milky Way photo recently which I spent hours working on following various online guides. I must have take it back to the beginning and started again at least 20 times. Eventually I got to a result I was satisfied with. It took a day or two for me to go back and feel pleased with the result. You start to over analyse it after so much time working on an image. I don’t know how the serious images keep their sanity 😛 

[Davey-T]

1 hour ago, Littleguy80 said:

Well Dave, this is the best I could manage. Used my Samyang 14mm Lens. I’ve got the ISS, Venus and with a lot of zooming I could just see Neowise through the clouds. If nothing else it’ll serve as a nice reminder of my observing location. 

Well done Neil, clouded out here.

Dave

[HaleBopp2007]

I managed to see the comet once again. The tail was longer visually, 1.5° long. I managed to get 2 degrees of it when I photographed it coming out of the horizon in the astronomical twilight (!). 

Edited July 8, 2020 by HaleBopp2007

[tooth_dr]

Tomorrow morning forecast is looking ok here, so I'm going to try to see the comet if it's possible.

I'm at 54oN.  Is this going to be possible?  If it is my observatory wont have a view of it, so I will need to just look manually with binos/DSLR on a tripod.   Any advice appreciated.

[HaleBopp2007]

WOW! Kevin Black managed to get the ionic tail in the photo! 

 

[happy-kat]

2 hours ago, tooth_dr said:

 so I will need to just look manually with binos/DSLR on a tripod.   Any advice appreciated.

Point the camera in the right direction and take a photo anyway it will see more than you will just watch for total wipe out if the sky is very light by diligent control of iso are my thoughts

[HaleBopp2007]

Just wow!! Spectacular image by Michael Jaeger! 

 

Edited July 8, 2020 by HaleBopp2007

[Davey-T]

3 hours ago, tooth_dr said:

Tomorrow morning forecast is looking ok here, so I'm going to try to see the comet if it's possible.

I'm at 54oN.  Is this going to be possible?  If it is my observatory wont have a view of it, so I will need to just look manually with binos/DSLR on a tripod.   Any advice appreciated.

Should be possible as folk in Scotland have seen it and it's gradually getting higher.

Being low is actually quite helpful as once found in bin's you can use a terrestrial landmark to align camera, I used Canon 70/200 at around 100mm,
f/4, 1/50sec', ISO400 but sky brightness is changing continuously so a bit of trial an error called for.

Dave