Comet Lovejoy, January 12th

Despite my earlier misgivings,

the fog and haze sort of settled in toward the ground, so there was a halo around all of the street lights, but it was reasonably clear up higher.

Fortunately, that’s where Comet Lovejoy is these days, and from there I can actually see it through the trees from the back yard, where it’s much darker than the front. Tonight Lovejoy formed close to an equilateral triangle with one leg being between Taurus and the Pleiades, with Lovejoy below them at the third point.

It was actually the first time that I’ve seen it with the naked eye. Knowing where it was at was a help, not sure I would have identified it without knowing which fuzzy spot and/or dim star it was in advance. But since it was a very easy object to spot in my binoculars, knowing where to look was easy.

All pictures are 3.2 second exposures with the lens at 75mm, ISO 1600, Canon Digital Rebel xT, no additional processing:

To make sure I got some pictures of the comet, I covered that whole section of sky with overlapping wide angle (75mm instead of 300mm) pictures. First aiming low and to the right, Lovejoy can be seen in the upper left corner, a green fuzzy spot.

Aiming higher, it’s now in the middle left, a bit in from the left edge.

Aiming still higher, Lovejoy’s now in the lower left, just above the bottom edge. You can see the Pleiades at the upper right. If the frame were slightly bigger, just up out of the frame’s upper left corner you would see Taurus.

For spotting Lovejoy over the next few nights, keeping Taurus and the Pleiades as reference points, Lovejoy will be in a shallow climb through this view, in a line up and to the right. By January 18th or 19th it will be directly below the Pleiades about where the top of that blurry tree branch is in the lower right.

Coming back down and over to the left a half-frame or so, Lovejoy’s now just to the lower right of center at about 5 o’clock.

Getting down to just over the treetops again, Lovejoy is near the top, just to the right of center.

Finally, even though it doesn’t show Comet Lovejoy, this picture does show something we get to deal with living where we live. The approach to Burbank Runway 8 is pretty much right over our heads. Here’s Taurus in the upper left, the edge of the Pleiades at the center edge right, (Lovejoy is out of the picture, approximately a third of a frame below the lower left corner) and a Southwest 737 going overhead.