Author Archives: momdude

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!

With the hazy skies we’re having it’s a little tougher to see the comet with the naked eye, but it’s still there once you know where to look.

Finding it with a camera or binoculars however is a piece of cake starting about an hour after sundown.

These first two pictures are from my tripod-mounted iPhone 13.

Bringing out the big guns, the view from my Canon Rebel Xt with the 70mm zoom lens is amazing.

If I went out to a dark sky location the tail would be much more pronounced against a black sky, instead of being washed out by the low-contrast haze and light pollution of the LA metro area. (That red horizontal line is a jet headed toward LAX.)

(Yet another jet just before the comet set.) One thing I worked on tonight was getting the focus done correctly with the big lens, and I think that I did a lot better.

Ladies & gentlemen, I give you Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS!!

It’s far enough away from the Sun so that about an hour after sunset it just popped right into view, in the binoculars at first, then easily visible to the naked eye!

These first two pictures are from my iPhone 13, normal 1x zoom first, then the standard 3x zoom. I was using a tripod and the iPhone used a 4.8 second exposure.

By the time I got the Canon with the telephoto lens set up, the head of the comet was just touching the top of Castle Peak from my front yard viewpoint.

So I hustled down the hill a few houses to where I can peek a bit more around the side of Castle Peak. (The streak at the upper right is an airplane headed down the coast off of Ventura County toward LAX.)

I only had a minute or two before the comet started setting below the mountain from the better viewpoint.

If you want to look for yourself, here’s a wide-angle view with some labels. Go outside about an hour after sunset and look due west. You might see the comet right away, like a little puff of lint or a dandilion seed floating 44 million miles away, but if not, find Venus. It will be BRIGHT. (If it’s moving, that’s an incoming 737, not Venus.) If it’s getting dark, two of the brightest other stars you’ll see in the west will be Antares to the southwest and Arcturus to the northwest. The comet right now is a little above the height of Venus and it will be creeping “upward” every night, and also getting dimmer every night as it hauls ass out of the solar system and heads back toward deep space for another 80,000 years. It’s about halfway between Venus and Arcturus. If you have a pair of binoculars, start slowly sweeping that area of the sky, and you’ll soon spot the comet, with its tail pointing up away from the Sun and the horizon. (The tail always points away from the Sun, since it’s ice and dust expelled from the comet as it heats up and then the ice and dust are blown away by the solar wind.)

The comet is probably past its brightest, but it’s now getting further away from the Sun which makes it much easiet to see. You should be able to spot it with the naked eye for at least a few days, and with binoculars for the rest of October at least. If you get clouded out in the next couple of days, don’t give up!

Happy comet hunting!

Fine – it’s the weekend!

I spent about 45-60 minutes out searching for Comet A3 with no success. The clouds were gone (which is good) and I from my spot four houses down the hill I had a good, clear view of the western sky.

The Canon (i.e., the “good camera”) should have seen it. You can easily see Venus (just to the right of the power wire in the lower left) and Comet A3 should have been at about the same height above the horizon, just above that small batch of trees silhouetted in the middle. That’s where the Bright Comet app said it should be, and that’s where the spotter charts from Sky & Telescope said it should be.

Wide angle image from my iPhone. I was standing under a street light, which is why the street and cars and houses are so brightly lit. My kindom for a BB gun or slingshot.

Normal image from my iPhone. Using a tripod so there shouldn’t be any wiggles or fuzziness in the long exposure. It’s crisp and clean, but there’s no comet there to be seen, which actually surprised me.

3x telephoto image from my iPhone. It was dark enough by this point to start seeing other stars, but still no sign of the comet or its tail. And in between sets of pictures every few minutes I was also looking with binoculars and seeing nothing.

It was a bit frustrating.

I know folks were seeing the comet elsewhere. There were hundreds and hundreds of pictures on social media, including many from the LA and Antelope Valley areas.

Tomorrow it should be a touch higher and in darker skies being further away from the Sun. I may also try to go find a spot outside of the area and away from all of the lights of the city.

We’ll see.

“Never give up, never surrender,” and all of that folderol.

Patience, however, may not be a virtue that I’m overly endowed with.

I walked down the hill a ways so I have a better view of the western horizon and at least saw a pretty sunset with a few clouds and some of the coastal fog hovering off far in the distance off of the Ventura County coast.

As I said, a reasonably pretty sunset and the worst of this latest heat wave has broken, so it was nice out.

(Image: Bright Comets app)

The comet tracking app (“Bright Comets,” highly recommended!) says that Comet D/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) should be right on the horizon as these pictures were taken, and getting further away from the Sun and its glare every day. But most folks figure it will be sometime over the weekend or early next week before it’s far enough away to be easily seen.

I knew that – I was here looking anyway. Just in case.

In theory, if it were darker, and if there weren’t clouds the tail of the comet should be rising up from about where that odd T-shaped antenna or light is silhouetted. But it wasn’t darker (maybe this weekend) and the clouds were there (maybe this weekend) so all I got was a very pretty sunset sans comet. And some really weird looks from the folks down the block who were coming home about then and wondering who the weirdo was standing on their sidewalk with a camera and a big pair of binoculars.

Maybe this weekend…