If you’re expecting one of those great, professional pictures that shows the bright comet trail stretching across half the sky, taken from a superior dark-sky location – Google it, move on, I’ll see you tomorrow.
But if you want to see how it really works for the amateur astronomer with decades-old, marginal equipment in the suburbs after four days of hunting – here you go!
See it? Click on the image to blow it way up, bigger than full screen sized! It’s right there!
Need some help? No worries. Let’s start over on the far right, where just over those trees you can see five of the seven brightest stars in the Big Dipper. The two left-hand stars in the bowl of the dipper are right next to the right edge of the image, with the three bright stars of the handle arcing up toward the lower center. Got them?
Now, just barely visible over the house, to the left of that tree in its back yard, is a bright star. That’s Arcturus, in the constellation Bootes.
Next, look straight up from Arcturus to right about the middle of the image. Do you see a “C”-shaped circle of six brighter stars, the open part of the “C” pointing to the upper right at bit? That’s the Corona Borealis constellation.
Finally, look between Arcturus and Corona Borealis for an elongated diamond of four bright-ish objects. Here’s a cropped image of that region, with Corona Borealis at the top and the “elongated diamond” in the lower left:
Using binoculars, I could see the comet pretty clearly, at least the fuzzy head (coma) and the tiniest bit of bulge of the tail. Not spectacular, not overwhelming, not mind-blowing, but also definitely not my imagination. I saw it to the left and slightly below two bright stars in a tilted, vertical orientation, with a much dimmer third star just above and to the right of the upper one. Here’s an even further crop of that “elongated diamond.”
Blow it up as large as you can on your screen. It will be grainy, that’s okay. See those two brighter stars in a tilted, vertical orientation with the much dimmer third star just above and to the right of the upper one? See the object to their lower left that’s a bit fuzzy, with sort of a dim, baseball diamond shaped bit of light off the top side?
That’s Comet Lemmon.
It’s not going to be the Astronomy Photo Of The Day any time soon, but it’s my capture. These days, you have to take the Teeny TEENY Tiny Bits Of Joy wherever you can get them.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 
Just returned from a week in a ‘dark skies’ area. Of course it was either raining or just cloudy the whole of the week. But last night I woke up at an odd hour and went to the window to look out. Stars. More than I’d seen since I left Norfolk five years ago. And I looked to the northwest, and could see a wavery chain of stars, which I now know was Corona Borealis. If I’d woken up an hour or two earlier, I might have seen the comet, as by now it was below the horizon. But at least I was looking in the right place! Then again, a few hours later it was solid cloud again, so a few hours earlier… who knows?
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