A comet-ty tale

[Stu]

I just thought I would post up a few images taken with my smartphone of Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE to show how much it has changed since I first saw it on 12th July. I unfortunately missed its early delights when I set my alarm incorrectly and slept in on a lovely clear night. Cloudy weather then made it impossible until 12th.

At that time it was an easy naked eye object, even from my Bortle 7 skies just south of Heathrow.

The first image is a handheld phone shot of the first time I saw it at 11.16pm on 11th July. Next up are some shots the following morning just before 3am through my Televue Genesis, taken with ProCam 7 and processed using PS Express. At this stage it was a lovely golden colour and the split in the main tail was obvious visually, just about captured in the images. In the scope the head of the comet was much tighter and surrounded by the coma, something that doesn’t show in these images.

Next up another widefield shot, this time from Ranmore Common near Dorking on 20th July. A darker sky (20.2 SQM compared with about 19 at home), and despite being dimmer it showed up well with the better skies.

Finally, an unprocessed then a processed shot from last night. This was the first time it was not visible to the naked eye, and it was obviously much dimmer in the scope, this time my Heritage 130P. What is lovely to see is the green colour which is obvious visually at the eyepiece but shows up even more clearly in the phone images . These are 1 second exposures and the unprocessed one shows how much LP there is to the North of me. Amazing I could get anything really.

I’ll still keep trying for it, but suspect it will dim fairly rapidly now.

[happy-kat]

Nice story and even in my much small observing time it's changed.

[maw lod qan]

Thanks for posting the images! I'm still struggling with evening clouds. Starting to wonder if I'll get a good go at it before it changes more.