We went out to the desert last night to see the comet after being harassed online by people asking if I was going to photograph it. Frankly, I had no intention of doing so, but I figured I ought to because I'd been doing way too much Facebook bragging about my star photos. So wife kitteh and I dragged ourselves away from the TV set and drove in a sullen silence 90 minutes out to S2 where it meets the I-8 in Ocotillo and then cruised north until we found a place with good visibility.
OK, to be honest we had a great time and I'm really thankful people suggested it. Wife kitteh climbed onto the roof of our X3 and lay in the warm, desert night breeze, looking at God's Jewelry Store while I played with my camera. It was lovely. Wife kitteh said she hadn't felt that much peace since the Wuhan Flu started.
As for the photography, the hardest part was still the focusing. I had pre-focused the camera at home, but that all went out the window when we saw the comet and realized we needed to zoom the lens. On the plus side, I now have a Nikon app on our tablet that will Bluetooth-download photos from the camera, so I could shoot, look at the picture on the 10" screen, try a different focus and then repeat the process.
I swear, well over half my time was spent trying to get the focus right. The D3500 has a video out connector and I'm going to see if it will show you what the lens sees if you connect it to a big video screen. That would make star photography incredibly more rewarding. In any case, the tablet connection was way easier than using the memory card as a transport to and from a laptop.
In retrospect, I also failed on my focus search algorithm. The D3500 manual focus ring doesn't have a stop. You can spin it endlessly. When it gets to maximum-infinity, which is past infinite-focus, it simply ceases to change the lens, it just spins. What I should have done was start at infinity+ and slowly dialed it back until I got something good. Instead, I started at what I thought was good and went up and down, trying to find something better.
All those years writing search algorithms in applied math classes and I still can't get this right. Sheesh!
Anywho, as far as the comet goes, it's kind of small and far away. With the naked eye, it looked like a cobweb or dust blob. With binoculars, it looked like a bigger cobweb or dust blob, but you could see the head. Here it is, in all its toad-like glory, photographed to the best of my search-algorithm-challenged ability. I left the photos quite large, so they might be worth a click.
Enoy!
5 comments:
I’d say those came out quite well.
I am unable to see it naked eye from my backyard here in San Diego, but was able to see it with binoculars (a mid-range decent pair - the main issue was no stability at all). Sounds like you could see it naked eye out there in the desert, so I may have to try that. Can you report the approximate time you took those (or how long after sunset)?
I haven't been able to see it at all here, since there is always just enough overcast that anything anywhere near the horizon has been consistently obscured by clouds. Compared to "not at all", your pics are a massive improvement.
I actually like the way that the comet is more of accent to a beautiful late sunset in that first picture. For some reason, comets keep getting pushed as if they are massive flaming spectacles streaming across the sky, rather than as the delicate, ephemeral things that they actually are. Even Hale-Bopp back in 1997, the brightest comet in the last century, was more of a faint wisp than a light show. That was the one that I had to get the 3200 ASA film and stand out in subzero cold, getting my pictures taken before my shutter froze closed. Got some nice pictures, but it was hardly a bright light-show.
Roger, I use these two sites for my planning:
https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/
https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/
Yesterday, true night started at 2130. Sunset was about 2000. It's not worth shooting until night. The lights on the horizon weren't sunset, they were San Diego.
I picked the S2 heading north from Ocotillo because Neowise was in the northwest sky, so I figured it would be easier to select a spot off the road if I was driving more or less northwest.
Tim, cloud cover is the worst. San Diego, even out where we live, is typically clouded over at night this time of year.
As for the comet itself, yeah, I'm pretty happy it wasn't a spectacular show. Those could easily end with a spectacular BANG! :-)
"The lights on the horizon weren't sunset, they were San Diego"
Oy. Well, on the bright side, the color looks like San Diego mostly uses sodium streetlights. Maybe a good sodium filter would blank out a lot of that.
Tim - Yes, San Diego uses Sodium lights. Mostly because the Palomar Observatory (and its 200” reflector telescope) is only about 50 miles away (pretty much due north).
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