Comet C/2020 (F3) NEOWISE from Wednesday evening. From the side of Highway 10 at an entrance to the Maumelle River WMA. This was a single 4 second image at f/4 with a 50mm lens on my Canon 800D at ISO 800. In my 10×42 binoculars, I could see a tail stretching about 3 degrees or six times the width of the Moon. This was taken at about 9:30 PM. It was directly below the Big Dipper tonight and should get higher in the evening sky for a while. Go see it.
Friday night was my second night out with my 11″ SCT (Elf) and the new Hyperstar adapter. Clouds, heat and humidity made things a challenge but I managed to get this before packing it up. First, I spent a while collimating the Hyperstar. This was not too hard and I hope it will stay but we’ll see. A few months ago, I learned that my CGEM mount has as polar alignment routine, not just the common star alignment, and using this gave me very little drift over the evening.
Anyway, I queued up 120 30 second images with what is essentially a 532mm f/1.9 telephoto lens. Unfortunately after about 40 minutes it clouded over and I had to cut it short. Also I found airplanes or satellites in a few of the images so I wound up with 69 images to combine. The largest galaxy is M81 or Bode’s Nebula. Above it is M82, the Cigar Galaxy. In the lower right and not very impressive in comparison is NGC 3077, the Garland Galaxy. The Hyperstar is used for wide angle small scale imaging so we don’t see a lot of detail here. Horizontally this image is about 4 times the width of the Moon.
I got up at 3:30 and decided to pursue the new Comet NEOWISE aka C/2020 F3). I remembered that the nature trail behind Audubon Arkansas has a hill with a nice view and would be accessible. I decided to ask forgiveness later as no permission would be forthcoming at 3:30 AM. My images aren’t as good as many you have already seen but here we have 28 frames at 3 per second. Each was 4.3 seconds long with my 50mm f/1.8 lens at ISO 800. The star at the top is Menkalinan, the one at the right Mahasim. The comet was visible to the unaided eye once located with binoculars and the tail was about 1.5 degrees long in my 10×42 binoculars.
