Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)...

Object: Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)
Type: Comet
Constellation: Lynx
Distance: 134 million miles

Date: July 11th. 2020
Equipment: ATIK 460EX with EFW2, Skywatcher f5.5 Esprit 100 ED refractor, Avalon Linear mount

Subframes: 10 x 60s and 3 x 120 sec each for luminance and RGB, stacked and colour combined in Astroart, final processing in PaintShop Pro

It was with faint optimism that I swung the telescope down to this target at the end of a long imaging session. Initially the scope was pointing at a hedge, but the comet soon cleared my local obstacles and starting at around 3 a.m, I rattled off some exposures before the comet was quickly drowned out by the brightening dawn twilight.

Mk1 NEOWISE image...

The subs were messy (to say the least!), full of weird gradients and blobs brought on by the rapidly changing twilight conditions and some local horizon objects crossing the field as the telescope tracked the comet.

I processed the one minute frames to give (after a lot of work) a cleanish image, but still plagued with psychedelic background colours (see opposite). I was going to leave it at that, but today I thought I'd layer in the sky background from my first image of this comet, plus some data from the 120 second subs which showed a hint of the blue ion tail. The eventual result is the main image above, which I'm rather pleased with...

This comet is probably the most striking since Hale-Bopp back in 1997. Recent infra-red studies show that NEOWISE's nucleus is quite large, at around 5 km in diameter, hence its brightness. Hopefully it will remain as bright as it moves into the south-western evening sky (at a more civilised time!) over the course of the next few weeks...