Night Sky and Neowise

On July 23, 2020 and deep in COVID restrictions, a local photographer and I went out north of town to get outside of the city glow to take some night sky photos. If you remember, 2020 brought us the comet Neowise. You could see it with your eyes in a really dark sky. Having the camera capture it helped to highlight the comet as the exposure time can be increased to pick up more light. We went to an oil well pad in the middle of very open/flat farmland. We got there just before sunset and just as important, moonset. The comet was dim enough that you did not want the moon adding light to the sky.

This first shot is a nice sunset photo. Fortunately, the clouds left with the sunset and we had clear skies.

Later in the night, we captured photos of the comet. Other photographers shared more spectacular photos of the comet taken during this time. Some of those photos look to be pretty heavily edited to enhance the tail. I chose a lighter touch on the edit to closer match my vision. This was my sole venture out and I was pretty happy with the results.

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