On the night of Jul 08/09, 2020, under good conditions, I took some pictures of Comet C/2020 F3 (Neowise) from a location in Pittsford. This is the first comet I've seen with my naked eye in over a decade!
This comet was first noticed in data from the NEOWISE satellite. It is currently passing close to both the Earth and the Sun, and is bright enough to be seen easily if one knows where to look. Some good sources for finding charts and background are:
I didn't take these pictures from the RIT Observatory; instead, I chose a site with a good horizon to the northeast: the parking lot behind the Pittsford Sutherland High School.
I arrived around 4 AM and set up my equipment. The comet was only a few degrees above the horizon at that time, but the sky was still pretty dark. It turned out that the best time to see it was between 4:15 and 4:40 AM, after it had climbed a bit higher in the sky.
Here's an image to show its position in the sky. The view is looking northeast, and is about 59 degrees wide by 39 degrees high. Venus is the brightest object in the sky, near the right edge; Capella sits in the middle of the picture, slightly above center. The short streak below Capella is the International Space Station. And if you look a bit below (and to the right) of the ISS, you'll see a faint object which appears slightly extended in the vertical direction: that's the comet.
Nikon D50 camera, Nikkor AF 18-35 mm f/3.5-4.5 D lens set to 18mm, f/5, 3 second exposure, UT 2020 July 9 08:31.
It's a bit easier to see the comet in this zoomed-in version of the center of that image.
Nikon D50 camera, Nikkor AF 18-35 mm f/3.5-4.5 D lens set to 18mm, f/5, 3 second exposure. UT 2020 July 9 08:31.
The comet's tail makes a stronger appearance in this image, which was taken earlier, when the sky was still dark. For this picture, I used a lens with better definition, but a smaller field of view: only 26 x 17 degrees.
Nikon D50 camera, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 AIS lens, f/2 3 second exposure. UT 2020 July 9 08:06.
To see even more detail, I used a telephoto lens of focal length 300mm, yielding a field of view of about 4.5 x 3.0 degrees. Since I was using a fixed camera tripod without any drives, the magnification led to a slight trailing of the comet in an exposure time of even a few seconds. Therefore, I took a set of 10 short images and stacked them to yield the picture below.
Nikon D50 camera, Nikkor 300mm f/4.5 AI lens, f/8 10x1 second exposure. UT 2020 July 9 08:19.
Tracy Davis accompanied me to the site, and we viewed the comet through binoculars (the best view, really) and our eyes as the sky gradually brightened. When we turned the binoculars to the northwest, we noticed a sharp vertical drop in the distant landscape north of the city. Tracy guessed that was the edge of the Niagara Escarpment. It's an obvious feature from this location. One can read about this in Geology of the Erie Canal Rochester Gorge and Eastern Monroe County New York State In the Footsteps of Amos Eaton and James Hall.
Last modified 7/09/2020 by MWR.