Some quick thoughts on exposure settings for comet Panstarrs

You may want to focus in and zoom on distant objects getting a sharp focus on something distant before the sun sets. Be careful not to look at the sun before it sets, aim far away from the sun if your checking focus before hand. Without the right filters it's dangerous to look at the sun. We will be looking at the comet after 6:30 pm after the sun has set. We will be looking ten to fifteen degrees to the left of the suns position before it set to try to locate the comet.

After the sun sets the sky will still be glowing.

If you know how to focus the camera and set manual exposures and you have a dslr. You may want to start with some high shutter speed like 1600 iso at about 1.5 to 2 seconds. Check out the exposure of mercury below near the school that I took in 2011.





Setting was 1600 iso at 1.6 seconds.

If you are using a tripod try taking different exposures and setting the exposures to different times. Perhaps starting with 1 second exposures and then taking longer ones, to get different exposures of the sky and comet and trail. Some programs can layer the exposures and create a nice composite depending on the program.






Of course if you use different iso settings, like iso 800 you may need to increase the exposure time. Double it for each lower iso number to get roughly the same results.

One can take an exposure that is ten or fifteen seconds with a fairly normal lens on a fixed tripod and not see much blurring of the stars or objects. A good fixed tripod and some practice ahead of time with your camera settings is important because we won't have much time to play or debug our camera when the comet is quickly setting.

You'll want to spend some time just looking at it.


It's kind of difficult to see the photo I took of mercury, and mercury was about ten degrees above the horizon at HJRO during this photo from last year. The panstarr comet will be only half as high Friday when it becomes visible. It will not be very visible from HJRO, and likely not visible at all from that spot Friday, so we will be in Allen Park on the hill instead with a better horizontal view.

You can kind of see Mercury in the zoomed in photo below it's half way above the chimney toward the clouds on the left in the photo below.



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