Chasing Stars - Hunting Comet Neowise
Sometimes, the best things in life really do happen by chance! While I certainly wouldn’t consider the ongoing pandemic situation to be a good thing, it has forced me to work a lot more with what I have in my own personal surroundings. The absence of any major commutes has also meant that I can spend a whole lot more time in the evenings on things that I really care about. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s just at this moment that a most unusual visitor decided to come calling.
Now to be fair, C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE), as this visitor is officially known, isn’t exactly new. It had first been discovered on March 3rd, 2020 by the Neowise program, a team that uses NASAs Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite to look for NEOs, or Near-Earth Objects. Normally, WISE is used to hunt for exoplanets, but it is regularly used to hunt for comets, asteroids and other such stuff that could come close to Earth. However, it’s only since it passed its perihelion back on July 3rd that comet c/2020 F3 really put on a show, and it only really became visible in the evenings about a week or two after that, at least at a civilised time. And just as you might expect, that’s when a prolonged period of cloudy weather set in here in Cork. Typical!
Anyway, on an evening in mid July, after yet another “thrilling” day in the home office, I decided to just chill on my balcony for a while, enjoying the warm evening and the clear skies…
Wait a minute…!!!
Clear skies?
I quickly checked the planetarium app I have on my iPhone, and yep, Neowise was above the horizon and should become clearly visible after sunset. Granted, my location is suffering from considerable light pollution, and I only have a pair of binoculars and my mirrorless camera with a kit lens, but hey, you have to work with what you have available, no use in looking wistfully at telescopes online… that happened later, by the way. As the sun set on July 16th, I set up my observation position on my balcony, using nothing more than my cameras and my light travel tripod. Since the Canon EOS M50 doesn’t have a connector for a remote shutter, I used my iPhone and the Canon app on there as a shutter control, relegating my iPad to star map/planetarium duty.
As a bit of a warning, I had to get "creative" to
My first shots were… not anything really. I started shooting way too early and consequently produced some rather interesting mood shots, but nothing really useful. That changed at 22.35, when a 92 second exposure showed something to the north-northeast of me. It looked like a smudge at first, but upon zooming in, it showed the clear tail of a comet.
I had him!
Day 1 – Experimentation
My first shots were… not anything really. I started shooting way too early and consequently produced some rather interesting mood shots, but nothing really useful. That changed at 22.35, when a 92 second exposure showed something to the north-northeast of me. It looked like a smudge at first, but upon zooming in, it showed the clear tail of a comet.
I had him!
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| Blurred and splodgy as the result of a 90 second exposure, but there's no doubt. That's Comet Neowise! |
Now that I had my reference points, I grabbed my binoculars and sure enough, there it was, C/2020 F3 Neowise in all its glory. The nucleus was glowing greenish-white in the binoculars and I could even see the bifurcated tail, a brighter bluish one consisting mostly of ions and a somewhat dimmer one in a brownish/golden colour, mostly made up of dust blasted away from the surface of the comet’s core or nucleus. This tail was massive by the way, taking up the entire field of view of my binoculars. It was absolutely breathtaking, even looking back upon it now, one week later, I find it difficult to put my exhilaration, my excitement into words. I almost felt like a kid again. Also, the hunt was now very firmly on, and my camera went into overdrive.
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| I particularly like how this image of the comet turned out. |
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| In retrospect, going for a wide-angle shot was not the brightest idea... |
My original shots had had some quite considerable exposure times, upwards of 90 seconds in some cases. While this produced some spectacularly bright images, it also brought with it a rather unpleasant reminder that the Earth is indeed spinning, as the stars, and indeed the comet itself, were dragged out into long light trails by the planet’s rotation. 30 second exposures still showed this blur, but to a much lesser effect and I ended up using that exposure setting for most of the remaining photos of Neowise that night.
It was now getting close to 23.00, and it was finally dark enough to see the comet with my naked eye. While it was nowhere near as spectacular as when viewed through binoculars, it was still impressive, with a clearly visible tail stretching out as far as the width of a full moon. By now, I had quite a collection of good photos on my camera’s SD card, despite the rotation blur, so I decided to experiment a bit and use my wide-angle lens to get a bit more of a panoramic view of the comet. The less is said about the results of THAT particular experiment, the better. All in all, my first experiment with astrophotography had turned out to be quite successful.
Day 2 – The best-laid plans of men and comets…
Observation on Friday was pretty much impossible due to solid cloud cover lasting through the day and into the evening, so my next chance to spot Neowise was on Saturday. This time, I planned everything ahead of time, at least that’s what I thought. I found a nice observation spot not too far away that was quite a bit darker than my balcony and packed my camera bag well ahead of time.
There were a few clouds in the sky when I left my flat at around 22.45, but I wasn’t too concerned. The big shock came after I’d set up my tripod. I’d made an absolutely moronic mistake and left the SD card for my camera at home! The case with all my other SD cards was also chilling at home, rendering the whole endeavour pointless. Dejected, I packed up my tripod and headed back to the apartment. By the time I’d gotten back, put in the card, clouds had moved in and I decided it was pointless to head out again. I set up my tripod on my balcony again and waited for the clouds to clear enough for me to see Neowise.
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| Yeah, thanks a lot nature! |
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| The clouds made hunting the comet quite interesting... |
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| Despite the very clear blue hue, this is pretty much the best I could do on Saturday. |
It took nearly an hour for a sufficiently clear break in the clouds to make itself known. While it was still visible with the naked eye, it had dimmed noticeably even over the span of just two nights. It was of course moving away from the sun, and with every kilometre, the tail dissipated more and more. Still, it was quite a sight to behold, especially with binoculars. I also managed to get quite a few decent shots, made all the more dramatic by the fact that the comet was framed by clouds. That’s not to mean that everything was tickety-boo, I wasn’t satisfied with the image quality at all. Still, it was the best I could do, and honestly more than I would have expected even a few days prior. In addition, my hunting instincts were now fully awake. I would definitely try again on Sunday!
Day 3 – Overplaying my Hand
In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have bothered heading out on Sunday. The entire day just seemed to consist of mother nature, or fate, or whatever effectively flipping me the bird! Most of Sunday, the day had been devoid of any clouds. However a the afternoon slowly morphed into the evening, more and more clouds appeared. By the time it had gotten dark enough to spot Neowise, the cloud cover had gotten so thick that even spotting the comet was almost an impossible task. I finally managed to locate it. At a much higher point in the sky than I thought it would be, and set up a few shots, getting my exposure and focus settings wrong in some combination or another every time. Finally, when I had it in focus and everything turned out to be just right, later inspection of the image showed that it was effectively useless as I must have gotten too close and caused my camera to jitter slightly. All in all, Sunday was pretty much a total disaster.
Day 4 – Once more unto the breach!
It was now Monday, and you would have been forgiven for thinking that I’d learned my lessons about staying up late on a workday just to photograph a comet. Still, I thought it couldn’t hurt to just give it another try. Spoiler Alert: This turned out to be a spectacularly bad idea!
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| By Monday evening, this was the best I could do from my balcony. Neowise was getting visibly dimmer by this time. |
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| The last useable image of Neowise, at least for the next 7500 years. Godspeed, and thanks for the show! |
By the time Monday evening rolled around, the skies above my apartment had almost completely cleared, making for ideal observation conditions. Still, C/2020 F3 Neowise turned out to be pretty damn elusive and spotting it turned out to be a major pain. When I finally managed to locate it, the reason became clear immediately. It had once again dimmed dramatically and was pretty much invisible to the naked eye, at least from my vantage point. It was still distinctly visible through my binoculars though, although the dimming was pretty obvious.
That being said, I managed to get another few great shots of the comet, the last ones I would be able to make. Even those shots showed it to be noticeably fainter, and its trademark tail was getting very hard to see. Two days later, Neowise made its closest approach to Earth at about 103 million kilometers.
It is by now well on its way out of the inner Solar System. Its path will take it through the asteroid belt, past the orbits of the great gas and ice giants, through the planetary rubble of the Kuiper Belt and out into the frozen wastes of the Oort Cloud, almost a lightyear away from Earth, or a quarter of the distance to Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighbouring star, where it will reach the highest point of its orbit in about 3000 years or so. By that time, it will show no trace of its former glory. Its once magnificent tail will have long since dissipated, its nucleus frozen solid. Out there, it will be nothing but a pockmarked ball of ice and rock, a “dirty snowball” like countless others in this outermost expanse of our solar system. It is out here that the sun’s gravity, tenuous though it may be, will finally pull this unremarkable snowball back inwards and over the course of millennia, it will retrace its steps back into the inner solar system, waking up along the way, forming another magnificent tail as it gets closer and closer to the sun on another cycle.
Throughout antiquity and the middle ages, indeed well into the baroque, comets were seen as portents of doom, harbingers of calamity. Given the current situation here on Earth, one could be forgiven for believing that this is still the case. However for me, these few days in July when half the world stopped to watch this lonely wanderer coast serenely across the night sky, utterly unaffected and indifferent to the trials and tribulations on this tiny insignificant ball of rock we call Earth, clearly showed just how temporary and fleeting our current worries and predicaments are. Life goes on, the universe goes on, and I personally find that thoroughly comforting.
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