Last night from home I did a quick setup on the driveway, with binoculars, camping chair, and c6 on the goto mount. I really wanted to meet up with the group in Binbrook but was just too tired to pack up the equipment for the long haul.

After looking at various star charts, it took my no time to scan around and find the comet that everyone is talking about. It was so cool to see it as an unusual glowing yellow ball in binoculars. It was so bright that you could even see it with your unaided eyes even with the full moon. I set up my mount for tracking and aimed it at the comet. You could definately make out a tiny bright core surrounded by a large circular glow. I hooked up my camera and snapped a few 30sec shots at a high ISO… wow… It was so bright that no detail was picked up on the camera I just looked like a large solid ball. I had to slow down my shutter speed to 16 sec and knock the iso down to 200. Ok now I was able to see something, the tiny bright core was very evident and there looked like the beginnings of a tiny stub of a tail. I snapped away to get as many frames as possible so that I could stack them. For fun I took one really long exposure to see if there was a tail but I could not see one. Could it develop a noticeable tail in the coming days or weeks??? Anyway my best captures as well as my experimental shot is below.

Canon40D + c6SCT @f10
ISO 200 exposures ranging from 16 to 30 sec. totalling ~3min
I increased saturation a bit and noticed some other colours.

underexposed to show the tiny core

The experimental shot… looking for a possible faint tail…
I read somewhere that the green glow from overexposing is probably from ionized gas, and can’t be seen visually. Cool eh?

By KerryLH