Chasing Comet NEOWISE

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Once I saw that Comet NEOWISE was going to not only be visible but also somewhat bright, I figured it would be worth a look. And after seeing people’s photos, I knew I would try to find it. It took a couple of tries, but I finally saw it.

When the comet was first visible, it was in the early morning, so I decided to wait until it went around the sun so I could look for it in the evening. Since we're both pretty far north and on the west side of our time zone, sunset is pretty late. My first attempt was to walk down the street where I thought I would have an unobstructed view. I took a few different lenses and a tripod, but since it was not long after sunset, I couldn’t see it. I was pretty sure I was looking in the right place, having spotted the location with an app that uses augmented reality to overlay the position onto your view.

Having tried a few different locations, I went back home and tried again when it got a bit darker. Melody went out with me, but again, the comet proved elusive. We were both pretty tired (we went on a pretty strenuous hike earlier in the day) so I conceded defeat.

Here’s my attempt at the end of the block with my phone, at about 10:30:

The next couple days ended up being overcast, so that put a damper on comet viewing. Finally, the sky was clear, so I waited until it got good and dark. This time, I decided to drive around to a place where there were few street lights than our neighborhood, and put my telescope into the car to try viewing Neowise with that.

I ended up on the south side of the Meadowbrook Playfield, as it slopes down to the north. I situated myself near a couple of trees which I hoped to use as landmarks to aim.

I hoped I would be able to see the comet with my phone, and was finally able to see faint glimpses of it with a long exposure. It was not that much different of an exposure than my previous try, but there was less light pollution (the comet is in the center of the photo):

I was ready to try with my big camera. Knowingly I would need lots of light, I went with my fast long lens; I have a longer lens with triple the reach, but it’s two stops slower and not as sharp. I started with exposures around 25 seconds and not zoomed in very far, but it was too slow. I got star trails due to the Earth‘s rotation. If you look at the large version of the image, the trails are pretty evident:

After speeding up to exposures off a few seconds, I needed to refine my focus (my camera has focus by wire and can go past infinity, so it took a bit of trial and error). The first attempts were close, but it was still easy to tell they were out of focus:

Exposure and focus nailed down, I zoomed in and got a few frames. I tried to not push the ISO too high to keep the noise low, which meant I would need to aggressively post-process the images since they would be underexposed, but that would be later. 

Thinking I probably had enough photos to have something I could use, I switched to the telescope. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find Neowise in the finderscope. I didn’t try for all that long, since it was getting pretty late. Back to home.

I loaded the photos to see what I had, and it was about as I expected. I was pleased that the focus was pretty good at the end, but since the frames didn’t have much range (due to underexposing) it was tricky to tease out detail without either losing the comet’s tail or washing everything out by brightening too much. I got to the point where the tail was visible and the sky was still mostly dark, and I called it good.

Seeing comets is a relatively rare event, so I’m glad I was able to get a look. In Seattle, it’s all about timing with the weather; it started to cloud over after I got home, so I got pretty lucky.