C/2020 F3 Comet Neowise
Date: July 24, 2020
Cosgrove’s Cosmos Catalog ➤#0043
Comet Neowise - taken with my Sony A7III and my SOny 100-400 Lens.
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About the Target
And now for something completely different. I don’t typically go after Solar System objects, but Comet Neowize blazed onto the scene during the Summer of 2020, and everyone who breathes air was asking me if I was going to shoot the comet. So I decided to make a half-assed effort to do that while I was talking other subs on the other scopes.
I finally saw Neowise last night for the first time. It’s now high enough that it clears the trees that block my view to the North. However, that view is lined up with the Henrietta/Rochester dome of light pollution - so not so good. I could not see it with my naked eye, only using large binoculars allowed me to see it.
About the Project
I used my Sony A7III camera with a Sony FE 100-400 G-Master lens. This was mounted on a heavy carbon-fiber tripod with a massive ball head.
I ended up taking 30 x 1-second exposures of it.
Stacking was a trick as the comet moves relative to the stars - so you have to stack on the stars and then stack on the comet and then put them back together. Deep Sky Stacker has a mode that will do this, but it takes a very long time for the computations to run.
The stars looked good, the comet was OK, but the trees did get smeared a bit.
The resulting image did not show either the comet very well at all. It was buried in the dome of light pollution in that area. To pull out the comet and suppress the noise pollution, I knew I would have to photoshop the living shit out of it.
So here is my image of comet Neowize. Wow - it sucks! I have seen so many beautiful ones I hate even to show this. But I was getting asked so much about it, I can now say.."Yes, of course, I shot comet? Who could pass that up?"
Capture Details
Light frames
30 x 1-second
Total integration time: 30 seconds
Cal Frames
none
