Comet Neowise

It is supposed to be at its closest on 23rd so hopefully......
It would also seem that the timings I am seeing are far later than Stellarium etc forecast... I have it forecast here from about 2204 for about 80 minutes, whereas UK seems to be after 0100.... That to me would indicate I should be looking at about 0300 + because we are a couple of hours ahead of you... or am I missing something here.

I`m out tomorrow night for hopefully some milky way shots (clear skies allowing of course), so we`ll give it yet another go.

We can see it here relatively clearly from just before 23:00 - BST. And it can still be seen until well after 2am (I went home to bed then!). I guess for Greece a couple of hours ahead, that bit of sky will have gone over at roughly your equivalent of 23:00 to 2am, although I guess that shorter window for you as you are further south than us.

Hope that helps!

Another - from last night. This was 6 shots stacked in Sequator. Each shot was about 20sec - used the Astrotracer. K1 and Tammy 70-200;

That looks great

The Astrotracer is such an underrated bit of kit.

Me neither! Maybe we're not nearly-so-wise, or, perhaps our view is just clouded! lol....

Thanks Haris. I agree, if you can be bothered to take time to calibrate and remember which mode to put the camera in etc, it is really good.
Looks like I should remove one of the shots from the stack - with the plane trail in!

It might be worth doing a little bit of an online play by play at some point if anyone's interested.

I'd love for more people to be able to do more with the feature so perhaps we can gauge interest and go from there.

The shot I started the thread off with was just a single 15 second exposure at f/5 determined by the K-1 with a -1.7 EV override. Why do some feel the need to take multiple exposures and stack them? Isn't that just complicating things, it's lit by the sun after all?

Stacking the images brings out the fainter details in the tails and reduces the impact of light pollution.
The ion tail emits light by fluorescence so stacking shots allows that to be made more clear above the random noise of a single exposure.

Thanks Haris. At least where I am on the coast light pollution isn't too much of an issue. There isn't much to the north for 20 miles or so.

Thank you for this John: I found the comet using the link you provided.

I tried to photograph it but no matter how hard I tried I simply couldn't find it in the viewfinder (there was insufficient light for the rear LCD to be of any use). However we had a fab view of it using binoculars and it was even brighter the following night when I stayed up until the wee small hours.


Thank you for the nudge towards Alyn Wallace's channel Stephen, plenty of useful information there and I enjoyed watching his post about photographing the comet with the Noctilucent clouds. I had seen such clouds a few weeks earlier and now I know what they are

I took a couple last night where there was a lot of light pollution, and no way could I see the comet with naked eye. I just put camera on tripod, set high ISO and tried a few shots moving around the sky until I found it. Once done, could then zoom in and take a more considered approach - hope that helps!

Actually I got the shot I wanted and wasn't worried about a big close up, Just wanted it in context with the general view from the garden. (I can always crop it!)

I said I can always crop it in my previous post. This is what happens if I rework it and do that.