The July Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE: Quite a Show!
Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE was definitely the comet of the year, one of the best in a couple of decades. Hovering low in the morning sky before dawn, then, later in July making its evening appearance low in the northwest sky after sunset, it provided hauntingly beautiful views of the night sky. Not much impresses more than a comet with a visible tail.
By July 20th, the comet was easily seen without optical aid, about 25 degrees above the northwest horizon just after sunset when the stars started to come out. It sported a long dust tail: to my eyes it appeared some 5 degrees long, but others were calling for longer, even up to 15 degrees. In either case, it was impressive. In binoculars it gave an even more stunning view. Below is a wide field photo I took of the comet on July 20 taken with a tripod-mounted Nikon D-810 and a 28-300mm Nikkor zoom wide open for 10 seconds at iso 1000. No tracking was used. Click on it for larger image.
This wide field show is a 10s exposure with 28-300mm lens on Nikon D810 iso 1000.
Desiring a closer look at the details in the comet’s tails, I needed to use a tracking system with higher focal length for better image scale. The best bet for such a large object is a wide field astrograph. I grabbed the Takahashi FSQ-106ED4X, a splendid modified Petzval refractor telescope, and placed it on a portable Losmandy G-8 mount, battery operated, for the field. Attached to this was a Nikon D-810a, the modified version of the 810, allowing more H-alpha light to shine through. Nikon made this camera deliberately for astro-imagers, but this comet doesn’t have a whole lot of H-alpha light to speak of. I set the system to tracking the stars and had the comet imaged for 1-minute exposures throughout the night at iso 1000, f/5, FL-530mm. By the end of the evening, all the gear was coated in dew except the heated objective lens (phew!) and I had some 30GB of images to deal with.
Once home and slept, the arduous task of slewing through all the images began. There were so many! I culled off the ones that had interference from automobile lights, lasers from people nearby shining them at the comet, kids with flashlights, and airplanes passing through the field. I kept the rest, some 30 near-perfect images. An example here, an unedited 1-minute exposure:
Unedited 1-minute exposure of the comet.
It’s a very nice image! The issue is that there is still some vignetting to deal with and some image noise from the heat and readout of the camera’s chip. There is always inherent noise to any digital system, and the solution? Stacking those images together in a median and getting a much cleaner and sharper image. The process is time consuming and CPU intensive, but well worth the effort. Stacking also gets rid of any one-time events like satellite passes (keep reading for more) which streak across the frames throughout the night. Surprisingly there are many. The end result of all the processing is this image below. It pretty much presents a fine portrait of Comet NEOWISE. The dust tail certainly spreads widely throughout the frame, and the blue ion tail is more than evident.
This was taken through a Takahashi FSQ-106ED4X telescope at f/5. iso 1000 with Nikon D-810a. This is a stack of 30, 1 minute exposures.
What about those satellites? Just how many are flying through all those images? Watch this video to see!
So many satellites! If you go through this video frame by frame you will also see one frame that has two streaks from a nearby green laser pointer. Alas.
Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE the July 2020 Surprise
This has been quite a year. Now, add to this a bright new comet, and it gets a little better, yes? Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE: Named after the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer’s asteroid hunting mission [https://neowise.ipac.caltech.edu/], this comet has become visible to the unaided eye, and, for now, is a morning object rising just before the Sun in the northeast sky. By the week of July 13th, the comet will be more of an early evening object, and it should also be getting fainter as it heads both away from Earth and the Sun.
Weather here in New Hampshire is not forgiving to astronomers. In July we typically have high humidity and heat. Add to that some vertical temperature instability, and thunderstorms will be the rule followed by wet foggy mornings once dew point is reached. We did have one clear morning this week, and that allowed for some quick imaging of comet NEOWISE. Be sure to click on the images to see in larger format.
Equipment used:
- Nikon D-810a with 28-300mm zoom lens at 150mm at f/3.5 and Optolong L-Pro light pollution reduction filter.
- Nikon D-810 with 300mm telephoto at f/4.
- Tripods with slow motion controls: untracked.
Those looking to spot the comet should bring with them a pair of binoculars and the information provided in this article from Sky & Telescope. Be sure to find a viewing location away from ground fog, and with a low horizon. A Bright New Visitor: How to Spot Comet NEOWISE [https://skyandtelescope.org/press-releases/new-bright-visitor-comet-neowise/]
A 360 Degree Tour of the 0.7m Dome
The new 0.7m telescope dome is up and running at Phillips Exeter Academy. There is still some serious testing to do in order to prove out the various bits and pieces that all have to integrate together: mount control, focus control, heaters, fans, pointing models, dome control, linking dome to the telescope, imager and filter wheel control. We’ve had a couple of clear nights, and thus far everything seems to be working. Below are two 360 degree tours of the building. One is a view from the control room. The other is from the dome. Be sure to use your mouse to look around the images by clicking and dragging. You can also zoom in and out. Enjoy!
A Wide Field Orion Taking on Taurus
Winter is the Orion time…. time to get a wide field camera taking snaps of the winter sky. Here is a wide field frame of Orion with his nemesis, Taurus the Bull. This was a process-image of seven 15-second exposures at f/3.5 28mm, ISO10000, with automatic dark frame subtraction using a Nikon D810a on a tracking mount. Post processing was done in PixInsight to stack the images using median combine, flatten the background, correct color, then crop and save off as a JPG with the correct histogram. Some graininess was removed in Photoshop in the end.
This shows Orion with its definitely-fading Betelgeuse (upper left shoulder), the Orion Nebula, The Barnard Loop, The Rosette Nebula, Sh2-264 (Lamda Orionis Ring) and NGC2175 (upper left). Click on the image for full size.
Wide field view of Orion and Taurus 2020-01-18
An annotated image is below. Once again, click on this to see full scale.
Betelgeuse is Fading
There has been a lot of buzz on the net about the star, Betelgeuse, Alpha Ori… the red supergiant in Orion’s shoulder (or armpit as people might prefer). It is a well known, bright red, supergiant, and it is a well known variable with a long period. Of late, it has been fading rather unusually for its regular patterns of ups and downs in brightness. This fading has everyone charged up…. you see, the star is old, near the end of its life. Stars of this high mass are supposed to supernova… BOOM! The trick is to know when. We have little idea on that, so any changes seen in stars like this make us get realllllly focused. Below is a snap of the latest observations of Betelgeuse’s brightness in V taken from the AAVSO. You can go see this data for yourself at www.aavso.org, and entering “Alfa Ori” sans quotes into the “Pick a star” field on the lower right of the page. Select plot light curve after that.
AAVSO V filter light curve of Betelgeuse
Where is Betelgeuse located? Here’s a chart as seen from mid northern latitudes tonight at 9:00pm
Orion with Betelgeuse as it would appear at 9:00pm from mid-northern latitudes tonight (January 15)