Comet Neowise

The Neowise comet was relatively dim in terms of classic photography - just another version of a night sky photo. If you leave the shutter open too long, you will get star trails as the earth rotates. One technique to overcome this problem is to take many photos of shorter exposure and then let software stack those photos on top of each other for the equivalent of a single exposure. Each frame is aligned to the others using the brightest stars and then all of the light from the exposures is added together. The big boys have a calibrated motor attached to their tripod/telescope that moves with the earth and can thus have very long exposures in a single capture. I'm not a big boy so I make do with this solution. Editing this stacked photo is a challenge as you are trying to balance keeping the good light and tossing the bad background light. The first photo is what I got after stacking 21 photos with each being a 3.2 second exposure - 67.2 seconds total. You can clearly see the double tail and the sharp nose angle at the comet. The second photo is an edit of the first while attempting to remove noise and darken the sky. As you see, I lost detail of the comet tail. My Photoshop skills just are not quite there....

The line through the photo is a single satellite passing overhead. The night sky is getting heavily polluted with satellite traces like this. The Starlink satellites travel in groups and will really distract from a photo (you know when you know). One source cites 3300 Starlink satellites in orbit now with 12,000 total planned. That number could be even larger in the longer future.

Take a trip to a dark sky location and sit in the middle of nowhere staring at the sky. You will never look at the sky the same again. My only dark sky (at least very close) was on a Boy Scout trip with Chris to Philmont. We were at 10,000 feet elevation on a moonless night in a valley surrounded by mountains. We laid in amazement in that meadow for over an hour. A similar experience is on my retirement bucket list. Links like the one below give you an idea of where to go.


Thanks,

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