The last time I saw a naked-eye comet was in 1996, comet Hyakutake. As I recall I was visiting my papaw and his kind spouse Juanita at their home in southern Ohio. They lived “out in the country” and so the skies were particularly dark. It was an amazing sight! That was before my photography days however so I have only memories.
Over the past couple of nights however I decided to go searching for comet NEOWISE. NEOWISE is another naked-eye comet if you are lucky enough to have very dark skies. Here in Bowling Green however, there’s plenty of light pollution. But…since I have a camera and I knew roughly where to look, I went to a local city park and set up my wide angle to see if I could locate the comet. After some newbie Photoshop work to remove some distracting power-lines, I got an image with the Big Dipper (part of Ursa Majoris), the International Space Station (streak below the Dipper) and comet NEOWISE at the bottom nearest the trees.
Once I located the comet, I switched to a longer focal length lens to get a closer image of the comet and went back the next night with another lens to do the same. Manually focusing was interesting, but luckily Jupiter was also up on the other side of the sky and provided a bright distant target to focus on. I happened to grab a shot of it as well with all four Galilean moons. Left to right they are Callisto, Ganymede, Jupiter, Io, and Europa.
Conditions were not ideal…lots of light pollution from the park, the city of Bowling Green, and a bit of leftover sunlight as I was photographing not too long after sunset. (Also, the temperature and humidity were both annoyingly high.) What a sight it must be from a cool, dry, high mountain! In any case, go take a look—you don’t need a fancy camera, just a pair of binoculars should do the trick even if you’re near a town!
