Day 735 – Bye bye, Leonard

Remember my excitement at these photos?

They were the ones I took of Comet Leonard during our New Year visit to Cape Agulhas. There are more on the original post above, along with a full explanation.

Well, there’s bad news for Comet Leonard and its fans today, I’m afraid:

Looks like I got there just in time, having got my shots on 29th December. And, as you can read in my post above, while they might not have been the most amazing images that were captured of Leonard, I had no specialised equipment (literally: a tripod and a camera), and couldn’t even see the damn thing with my aging naked eyes. I was chuffed enough.

Bring on the next comet, and I’ll have another go.

Day 662 – That Comet

It all seems so long ago now. In a galaxy far, far away.

But it was actually less than 3 weeks ago when the boy wonder and I stood on the front stoop at Suiderstrand and tried to find Comet Leonard somewhere in the vast Western skies over the South Atlantic Ocean.

A little route finding via instructions on the internet and a bit of good fortune, and there it was (sort of) in plain view. Kind of about that far [indicates an approximate distance] across to the left at about 10 o’clock from Jupiter.

Don’t bother looking now, of course.

Things will have moved.

We tried a million (only just an exaggeration) different ways of photographing it, fiddling with the ISO and the shutter speed on most every shot, and given that the wind was PUMPING, the locals had the place lit up – appropriately enough – like a Christmas tree, and we didn’t have any specialist equipment like a tracking mount and the like, I’m fairly happy with the results. A little tweak here and there in Lightroom has made a difference too.

Here are a few of our efforts:

Both at 211mm | 6s | f5.6 | ISO 6400

Yes, some streaking because of the exposure length required to get enough comet action, but actually, that only serves to make it look like it was moving very fast. Which it was of course (see below), but this isn’t whizzing in and out of the stars like you see in a movie or a cartoon. And yes, those two above are crops because even at 200mm, it’s still just a tiny smudge in the sky:

200mm | 8s | f5.6 | ISO 8000

In fact, even at 150mm (the widest my chosen lens could get) you’re still getting quite a good zoom on the thing. I should have taken a shot of the whole sky. The more I think about it, the more I realise that we did well to find it, let alone shoot it.

150mm | 2s | f5.6 | ISO 16000

A quick wave to (and a wish upon) the photobombing shooting star on that one.

Many people (with or without better equipment than me) will have taken many better shots of Comet Leonard, but I don’t care. We went out after dinner, stood in the relative darkness and the northwest wind with a tripod and a basic DSLR and took photos of a little 1km diameter ball of ice travelling away from us at 254,411 kph (70.67 km a second!!) and already 106,909,845 km distant.

Wow.

More Comet Leonard information.

Galactic editing

After I posted a photo I took over the weekend, long-suffering reader and all-round top ‘tog Chris J Wormwell (you may remember him from such posts as Chris’ PoA sky & lighthouse p0rn and The photo that I wanted to share yesterday but couldn’t because the dog ate the internet) got in touch with some sage advice:

This was a huge help and step forward for me recently: https://www.lonelyspeck.com/how-to-process-milky-way-astrophotography-in-adobe-lightroom/

I clicked through, and was rewarded with a step-by-step guide to making this photo:

look better:

And it only took me ten minutes or so.

Some points from my experience:
I think the photo looks much better.
Note that all that stuff was there in the original – you just couldn’t see it.
If I can do it, so can you.
The guide was really helpful.
I now know that I will need to take a better photo next time if I want to make it even better.
But also, I now know how to do that.
There are loads of other ideas for night photography on that site that I haven’t had chance to look at yet.

A(nother) new door has been opened. Thanks, Chris.