We Love The Stars Too Fondly

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.

I hauled my binoculars, two tripods, three cameras, and four lenses over a block or two to the dark area where the empty lots in our subdivision are. Few lights, which is good. Scattered clouds, which is bad.

If you click on the image to blow it up, on the right you’ll see the three stars that make up the handle of the Big Dipper. Follow that arch to about just over the right-hand street light in the distance. Right about where that cloud is. That’s where Comet Lemmon C/2025 should be. I’m not seeing it.

Off to the south, there were clouds over Cajon Pass, lit up by the traffic coming up I-15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

The predicted peak brightness for Comet Lemmon is about now and in the next day or two. From here out it should be fading slowly. I’ll look for another of those “clear and a bazillion” days and see if we get lucky.

Well, extremely limited joy at best. Comet Lemmon (C/2025 A6) is in the evening sky right now, 60-90 minutes after sunset, in between the “handle” of the Big Dipper (easy to find in the northwest) and Arcturus (the brightest, orange-tinted star just above the horizon in the west). I could spot the coma (head) with binoculars, just a grey, fuzzy puffball, but no tail. I tried to photograph it both with my iPhone and with the good Canon DSLRs using both the wide-angle “light bucket” lens and the “regular” 50 mm lens. In all of the longer exposure photos there’s a fair amount of light from the porch lights at the neighbors’ houses. I can sorta see a fuzzy dot where the comet should be, but not enough to be 100% sure that it’s it. Tomorrow I’ll take the cameras out to some empty land near our house, away from all of the house lights, and see if that helps.

Meanwhile, the atmposphere today was PERFECT for contrails.

The sunset lighting helped!

I do wonder what causes the sawtooth pattern that’s seen so often. Is that an atmospheric effect, or something caused by some sort of pulsing in the engines?