I arrived with a bunch of astronomy gadgets loaded (perhaps I should say heaped) in my car.
I made a rookie mistake which is: Don't use equipment you're not used to using for a special event.
I borrowed a tripod from a friend. But I was unfamiliar with it and it was untested with my little Nexstar 4SE. I hoped to get some tracking shots of the comet from the Nexstar 4SE. It's probably better to be more organized and bring fewer pieces, rather than try to bring everything but the kitchen sink.
The sky cleared up pretty good, but some haze and thin clouds still made it difficult to see the comet.
I think the haze was thick enough to cause the tail which is gas and fainter to be extremely faded. We had more haze than we did on Wednesday.
I'll post more and post some more pictures later.
It seems like several members tried to see the comet tonight and maybe 50% of them saw it with others not seeing it.
There was plenty of haze early on, which most of us didn't catch or realize. That likely effected the comet and probably hid it's tail from sight appearing perhaps at first like a faint star. Nobody could find it. Greg Ozimek had a nice camera lens and couldn't find it. I couldn't find it tonight easily as I did yesterday. It fell so low that Gordon Hansen spotted the comet with 10 by 50 binoculars. He beat out my Vixen BT-80 and found the comet. Nobody else had luck and I was beginning to wonder if anyone would see it de to the suspended dust and haze we were looking through.
FAAC was very busy yesterday. We had two volunteers work on HJRO. We had two presenters who presented Astronomy, some basics and show how astronomers use math. We also had the Special Interest imaging group and Brian and Gordon arrived from the early terminated astrophotography sig.
Some tried to view the comet solo from various parts of the town and area. Many solo viewers never saw the comet, because it was more difficult to find. It's easier to find it as a group, because once someone spots it, we all can move our telescopes and binoculars to cover it.
I'd say more with this post but I'm pretty tired. I have to pause and just post this minor touched up photo. This taken from my Nexstar 4SE from a fixed mount. I took some other better exposures, but none of these showed the comet.
Who knows if Gordon hadn't seen it, we all might have missed it.
This photo was taken at ISO 1600, one second exposure, through Celestron Nexstar 4SE.
Other four four second exposures on that setup were blurred a lot more on the same fixed tripod.
I'll write more later and post more photos. Right now I'm toast and the bed is calling me.
Also: Some other members of FAAC took some comet photos and "both Tim Dey and Tim Campbell worked on the motorized mount at HJRO tonight. These two also used 10 by 50 binoculars and saw the comet briefly high up in the sky over the High School in Lincoln Park. But of course the horizon is a lot worse in Lincoln Park by the high school, so they could watch the comet for more than a few minutes.
They were luckier than some remote viewers in the club who tried, but never found the comet.
Also I have seen the photos some other FAAC members took and they took better photos than I did.
They had tracking scopes and I was using the telescope on a fixed tripod that didn't track.
And for some reason, I didn't get a good wide angle wide shot with the Canon EOS and it's stock lens. We had another astronomer (Greg Ozimek) out at Allen Park, who took some wide field shots and they looked like they turned out.
As I had taken some decent wide field shots of the comet from the night before, I didn't worry about taking the camera off the telescope to get wide field shots later in the day.
I think some of my early wide field shots were taken when there was to much brightness in the sky and the comet didn't show up in those photos. It could be that the haze added to the difficulty in seeing it, before it was much darker.
Thanks to everyone who made it out including FAAC Astronomers, Brian Kutscher, Rick Arzadon, Gordon Hanson (president of the FAAC club) and Greg Ozimek. We also had some visitors who have been up on the hill before and of course met some new visitors. I also want to thank Mike Stamey who loaned my a nice tripod, unfortunately I didn't have the time to get it setup correctly.
I think next time I may make my setup more simple and bring less telescopes. I think it would be better to have a laptop computer hooked up to a wide field Canon EOS setup and take pictures and review them on the large screen to help locate the comet, perhaps before a binocular user would find it. That would help immensely in finding a comet like this.
I hope this makes sense when I read this again in the morning. I wrote this pretty late and fell asleep a bit while composing this blog entry. (I had some problem with photoshop and my mac before doing a basic curve adjustment on the image above.) I did an RGB curve adjustment on this single image and did one more filter action to get rid of soft gradients. But then readjusted it a bit in Preview adding some of the gradient back in. So I'm sure I can work these photos better. I took a lot of 4 second exposures tonight and those didn't show a sharp comet head as they should have. This because I was using a telescope with more power that amplified the movement of the earth and also because it was "fixed without a tracking motor."
Greg
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