Cosmic Double Header In One Picture

So, as I thought, or as I expected thanks to the Heavens-Above.com sky maps, tonight I got to see the ISS sail right past Comet NEOWISE!

Click on that beauty and look for the comet near the bottom, the Big Dipper way above it, the ISS passing between them, and one of the ever present commercial jets out of LAX headed toward Asia!

Did you get them all?

The comet’s a little blurry, as are the stars, since they’re stacked from a series of about ten images, each ten seconds long, and nothing’s standing still in that time, so… blur!

What was the camera with the big lens doing while all of this was going on?

The usual – taking pictures of the comet after it got dark. I missed catching the ISS & comet together in this smaller field of view. I guessed wrong and had the camera a bit low, ISS passed just over the top, out of sight for this lens.

But I shot ten second images for over 45 minutes, so there might be a good time-lapse video to come. But not tonight. I’m exhausted. It’s been a tough week.

But sometimes, even at the end of a long, tough week, you get the camera position correct enough to get lucky enough so you get to see the comet an extra five minutes as it slips down perfectly in between those branches on that tree.

I’ll take what I can get!