Category: Solar System

I returned to the Maumelle River WMA with Carl to try for the comet again. The conditions were not as good as Wednesday night. Clouds, haze, heat, mosquitoes. The sky did do some clearing so I took some shots. I set up a tracking mount this time since I wanted to shoot at 300mm instead of 50mm. I hoped to take 30 second subs but my slapdash polar alignment didn’t allow for that. I settled on 10 seconds which was still too long but without tracking, I could only have done a second or so.

The haze cut down the contrast a lot and in fact toward the end you could barely make out the comet in binoculars. When I first looked at the images, I thought the night was a bust but decided to stack 10 images (with Deepsky Stacker) and see what that looked like. I was able to get something I could work with. I processed the result in Lightroom Classic. Each frame was 10 seconds, ISO 3200, 300mm FL, f/5.6.

I might be kidding myself but I think I can barely make out the ion trail above the bright dust trail to the right of the comet’s head. The dust trail curves downward slightly while the ion trail is straighter.

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.

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.