Category Archives: Space

FYI, iPhones cameras may be good (actually, about 100,000% better than they have any right to be) but still in pretty much the middle of the night at maximum zoom with nothing to focus on… not so much.

Just enough detail there to see what it must have been from yesterday morning (so, I guess that, technically, that’s context) but no sign of any comet.

No joy as well to see it in the evening sky tonight. There’s a hill over there that’s higher than ours, so we don’t have anything like a flat horizon, and when it got dark enough to see (30-40 minutes afters sunset) it would have already been down behind it.

The good news is that it’s going up about 3° per night, so by Tuesday or Wednesday the odds should be better. As long as the comet hasn’t dimmed significantly.

Happy hunting!

A second night up at Oh’Dark Thirty, this time about a half hour earlier than last night in order to see Comet NEOWISE F3 as it’s rising. Since there’s a limited amount of time between when it rises and when it gets too light to see it (as the Sun is rising also – stupid Sun!), I planned on using as much of that time as possible.

It was a great plan. I even got out of bed and dragged the tripods and cameras out. Probably got set up about five minutes before the comet actually cleared the houses on the far side of the canyon. A great plan.

The clouds on the horizon had other plans.

Fortunately they were hugging the horizon, so about the same time as yesterday, the comet popped out above them. Again the head of the comet was visible to the naked eye, but the tail wasn’t. Again, the tail was freakin’ spectacular in binoculars and shows up well in photos.

Better photographs by others (bigger telephoto lenses, guided so they can take longer exposures which aren’t blurred by the Earth’s rotation) are showing some fine structure in the tail as it was spreading out, with a separate, blue-ish colored ion tail. If you blow up these photos you can see hints of that structure, which isn’t bad for a simple tripod and 75-300 zoom lens set up in the street with no guidance.

It wasn’t long before the dawn got so bright that the very low-contrast comet started to vanish. But there were other objects in the sky.

Due east were Venus (top, bright white) and Betelgeuse (below center, dimmer reddish). The interesting thing here is the ghost artifact to the right of Betelgeuse. That’s a reflection of Venus’s image inside the telephoto lens. But, while Venus itself is massively overexposed and looks like a blob, the reflection is not and shows the very thin crescent phase of Venus.

Straight overhead were Mars (dim, red, above & left of center) and a 3/4 Moon. The Moon is very, VERY overexposed in this 1/30 second exposure. How overexposed?

To get this correctly exposed picture of the 3/4 moon I had to go down to the limit of the Canon XT, 1/4000 second. The moon is really freakin’ bright.

I won’t be trying to get up at 04:00 tonight. For Los Angeles’ latitude the comet is in that transition between being in the morning sky and the evening sky where it technically IS visible in both, but so close to the sun and close to the horizon that realistically you’re not going to see it without perfect weather, a flat horizon, and some luck. (If you’re curious, play with the SkyLive time settings around sunrise and sunset for a day or two before and after today to see how it works.)

But starting tonight and then improving drastically by the day, the comet will be climbing into the sunset sky shortly after sunset. And I mean very shortly after sunset for the next couple of days (see SkyLive…) but by mid-week it should be a pretty easy object to spot, assuming it doesn’t have some massive dimming. Which can happen with comets.  Folks have pointed out that comets are like cats – they’ll do whatever they want and it’s almost always unexpected and designed to piss you off.

Happy hunting!

Have I mentioned the comet that’s gotten surprisingly bright in the morning sky and will be moving into the evening sky in the next few days?

First of all, if you want to see where to look for it yourself, there’s a free planetarium site online called TheSkyLive. Here’s a quick tutorial I did to walk you through setting it up for your location, looking for this comet in particular, and then bringing up the clock controls so that you can see where the comet will be on any given day or time.

Last night I was up at 04:45, but I wasn’t hunting blind. I had already run through the morning scenario using TheSkyLive (as well as the excellent Star Walk app on my iPad) and I knew that the comet (see above – click on the picture to blow it up full sized) would be at 44.8° azimuth, which is northeast. (You don’t need anything like that sort of accuracy unless you’re pointing a telescope. Knowing which way’s north (0°), which way’s east (90°) and eyeballing the halfway point is just fine!)

Knowing that, I had checked out a spot in the back yard which has a clear view in that direction, but also has an 8′ tall hedge between our yard and the neighbors’. Not good – the comet’s going to be low. So I went out in front and found a spot at the bottom of our driveway and another across the street where the view was clear, except for one of the aptly named “hills” in “West Hills.” But we’re on top of another one, so I was hoping I would get lucky.

I did.

As soon as I got out there, about 4:55, the head of the comet was clearly visible to the naked eye. There were a couple of wispy clouds over in that area and the sky was starting to lighten. To make sure I had it correctly I took a look through my binoculars. (Celestron 9×63 with a 5° field of view.)

Oh, my!

Through the binoculars it was spectacular! The long tail was evident, with some structure in the tail showing. I wasn’t 100% sure that I could see the separate ion tail, but thought that I could.

I set up the camera quickly.

I was using the “normal” lens but zoomed in to 55mm. This is a 1/4 second exposure and is approximately what I saw with the naked eye. You can see the comet just above and to the right of where the two wires cross. (Click on the photo, blow it up to full size, etc.)

But cameras can see more than the naked eye can. Time to crank up those exposures a bit, knowing that it’s a race against sunrise, which is going to wash out the comet completely in just a few minutes.

A 1/2 second exposure.

A one second exposure. You can now clearly see the tail stretching straight up (pointing away from the sun always as the solar wind strips ice and dust off the comet).

You can also see that it’s getting bright. I hadn’t realized that the big telephoto lens would be better, so I went back into the house for it.

In the few minutes that took, the sky had lightened a lot. That stupid little pink cloud was trying to make trouble so I set up in a slightly different spot. The comet again is clearly seen along with the tail, but the sun’s going to wing this battle.

So I saw it. It’s beautiful and spectacular.

I’ll try again tonight. (Sleep is for the weak and sickly!!) And having learned a few things, I’ll get up about a half hour earlier and try to catch it about the time it’s just clearing those trees. But it will be much more dark, and stay that way for a while…

You should try to see it also. If not by getting up at 04:00, then by waiting about four or five days to where the comet (which is moving, just like the planets and everything else) will swing away from the Sun and into the evening sky. By the end of next week it will be setting behind the Sun in the evening dusk, climbing a little bit higher toward the Big Dipper every night. Use that app I gave you to play with the times to see when you might see it.

And if you’re in SoCal next week, there will be GREAT ISS passes in the evening on the 15th, 16th, and 17th. Maybe a picture with the ISS and the comet together?

Happy hunting!

There was a so-so ISS pass tonight – there’s a much better one tomorrow. This one was low, not the brightest you’ll see (M-2.5) but not terrible, fading into night only 30° above the horizon.

(Image: Heavens-Above.com)

However, it was only partly cloudy tonight after several frustrating, cloudy nights, so it was time to test my theories about focusing my new lens.

(Images stacked using StarStaX)

The good news is that the focusing issue seems to have been resolved.

The bad news is that I was shooting with a honkin’ huge street light just off to the left, the neighbors’ yard lights directly across the street, light haze, scattered clouds, and a nearly full moon that that the haze lit up light a neon light. Plus, you know, the usual godawful light pollution in LA.

So I shot shorter exposures, eight seconds instead of ten or fifteen.

The next cover of  “Sky & Telescope” magazine? Hardly. A solid proof-of-concept test of my new lens, or more accurately, my ability to correctly use it? Pretty good.

Wait, what was that trick I learned yesterday?

Just remember, if you go out to look for yourself (like, maybe tomorrow!) it’s going to be a bright pinpoint, not a line, and it’s going to move at about fifty times slower. In real life this video took about two minutes and fifteen seconds.

But I do like making these little GIF’s!