Fading But Still Visible

After two nights of clouds and fog (and the constant heat waves of the summer are long gone, it’s getting chilly out there at night!), tonight was mostly clear, so it was back to the comet hunt.

I could see it with binoculars from my front porch, but took the cameras down the hill for a good view of the western horizon.

It’s up there, just to the left of that wire, and you can see that it’s dimmer than it was just three days ago.

It’s also gotten much higher. So now it can be full dark (or at least, as dark as an urban site like Los Angeles can be) with the comet still fairly high and away from any clouds or lingering sunlight immediately after sunset.

As for those wide bands of light in this image and the “X-shaped” light beams below? Internal reflections in the iPhone lens from the ton of lights in my neighbor’s yard. Why does he have to have it lit up like that every single night? There’s nothing going on there, no parties or anything in that back yard…

With the haze and light pollution and the one-day-after-full-supermoon rising behind us, it’s tough to get a lot of definition in the tail, but you can see it there. I may have to play with Photoshop to see if I can tease out more details.

All of these pictures were taken with the iPhone 13 on a tripod, which was necessary as the wind was kicking up again.

Not the same picture twice, but close.

I was trying to increase the exposure time on the iPhone to get it to overexpose the neighbors’ houses and landscape instead of underexposing the comet. Marginal results, at best.

I shot a lot of images with the DSLR and the zoom lens, but with it zoomed in I couldn’t tell if I was pointed at the comet or at some empty piece of sky near the comet. 96 pictures and just one of them scored. I need to work on that.

If you have a clear sky this weekend, take your shot and go looking for the comet about an hour after sunset. It will be above the western horizon, to the right and above the very bright planet Venus. It will help a lot if you can get away from city lights and out to someplace with a dark sky. Binoculars will help a LOT. Happy hunting!