Ken Anderson and Greg Knekleian viewing the comet, while Orion the moon, Jupter and M45 shine brightly overhead. There is no comet inside the photo framed above, the blur in the top right corner is simply flaring from the moon on the camera lens.
(Yes, I know the moon is overexposed, I didn't think to take multiple exposures of this to bracket and layer this, making it more realistic.)
How I ended up in Milford instead of locally to view the comet.
I was planning on trying to view the comet from Allen Park, but as I was driving I noticed a lot of clouds. I called a few members of the FAAC club and found out some were going to be looking at the comet out a ways. They claimed that the clouds looked pretty bad, but there was some thinning of clouds.
I had planned to meet James and perhaps a few others. James told me he wanted to meet in Allen Park if the sky looked promising.
While driving and looking at the clouds and layers and layers of clouds and haze, on multiple levels, I decided that I should head out to try to find a better viewing area.
I drove out toward Dexter last week to see if conditions would improve, but they didn't. This time I'd head out toward Milford.
I drove out I-94 toward I275. Clouds in the west looked thick with some breaks but they didn't look good toward Ann Arbor. I called a friend and asked him if it was cloudy in Dexter. He said yes. A bad sign. Ann Arbor weather travels toward the downriver much of the time.
As I was turning onto I275 I called James to let him know I made a last minute decision to ditch the viewing in Allen Park due to clouds. I mentioned I didn't think the clouds would clear up around here and I was risking the same thing but driving out quite a ways, in hopes of seeing the comet or at least to chat with members way out that way, if the clouds were bad out there.
Things didn't look very good, but the cloud bands seemed to thin out a bit toward Plymouth. As I turned onto I96 toward Milford the sky looked pretty good but some thick cloud bands were in the distance toward the setting sun. This might be bad, I thought, because I'm driving toward the cloud bands. Shouldn't I be driving in the opposite direction as the sky was fairly clear above me?
It's tough to race the clouds and setting sun.
I stopped to get some gas in the car in Novi Michigan. It was cold out, and I decided to grab a few hot chocolates as George and Ken said they'd try to be there and observe. With 3 large hot chocolates from Tim Horton's I continued my trip. The sun was setting and I was running a bit late.
We were going to observe at a FAAC observing site, where we have permission to be after dark. At least one of the sites. One of the reasons people join astronomy clubs is clubs get permission to use certain sites and watch the stars late at night, without being thrown out of a park.
So I finally arrived at Island Lake State Park, and drove in to meet Ken and George.
Ken was there up on a hill near Spring Mill pond. He was up there alone, George should have been there ahead of me. The walk up the hill in partly snowy conditions caused me to change my equipment deployment plans a bit. Ken and I used binoculars. I took up my binocular telescope, my Canon EOS camera and a couple tripods. Ken had two binoculars up there, actually more than two, but two were setup on tripods or monopods.
Ken was looking for the comet and thought he saw it and he described where he thought he saw it. Above 5 degrees above the horizon. This was around 8PM when he looked and thought he saw the comet. It was way higher than 5 degrees, but we were unsure of where the true horizon was. I mentioned it was likely 13 degrees above at 8pm and probably about 10 degrees above at 8:20.
The sky continued to get darker, and we scanned the skies, but didn't see it at first.
I setup the Canon EOS and took some wide angle photos. The wind was blowing and fairly cold up on the hill. I forgot my gloves in the car. Then Ken saw the comet through his medium size binoculars. I think he said they were 15 by 70mm or something in that size range. He also had 25 by 100 binoculars which were nice.
Ken saw the comet through his binocular on a monopod, but he was near my camera when this happened. As he moved to the location of the bigger binocular, he somehow lost the bearing on the comet's location. He said I can see it naked eye as well, when he first saw it. But then he couldn't find it.
This is an object that can easily use more than one set of eyes and pairs of binoculars to look for it. It's better to be in a group. I scanned around, looked it up on the Sky Safari app and tried to locate it. Then I found it in the BT-80 binoculars and we were able to get a fix on the location for more viewing.
There were some clouds and haze, they looked thin and cut down on the clarity of the comet some. But we could still see the comet.
I took some photos at 1600 ISO then reframed them and took some closer ones with the Canon EOS camera. I thought about getting the Nexstar 4SE and hauling it up, but I didn't have it mounted on the Vixen telescope as I wanted to use it piggyback on the Vixen binoculars to take close up photos.
We were enjoying viewing the comet to much for me to make another trip and project. The change in location, changed the equipment we could deploy easily.
We ended up taking some nice photos of the comet and enjoying the view. We took a few photos of use looking up as well and one facing the camera with the comet in the background. This background comet photo was taken later in the evening as it faded more and more and was quite low, so that photo op was planned a little to late, to get a better shot of the comet in our background.
Once home I decided to do some quick editing of some of the photos. Really basic editing, making a few adjustments in Preview on the Mac, which is really basic and also using Neat Image Pro noise reduction to get rid of any noisy grain that might overwhelm the photo.
Below are some of the results. These images were edited fairly quickly.
I like editing the images and playing with different edit tools in different programs.
This photo is cropped a bit from a wider shot. I processed this photo to give it a darker look that kind of matched what we saw. The camera picked up more detail and makes the image much brighter with a fixed 4 second exposure at 1600 ISO.
By cropping and saving the photo we have a photo that is framed closer and shows the comet more.
Do you want to see the wider shot. I know the above photo looks wide, but I was using a wide lens setting, not zoomed in at all really. So the actual shot doesn't even show the comet clearly, but you can see how wide the area was and the nice wide angle vista of our western horizon.
(Note I didn't put a graphic on this photo, but all photos on this page are copyrighted by me. I don't have a problem with people using them to promote astronomy or for club use. )
(If you have a question about these photos or want to use them just drop me a note at GKnekleian@gmail.com)
I also took a few photos of us up there. Nice to get some documentation of the viewing experience.
This photo was also a long exposure 15 second exposure and the comet is blurred a bit. If I look blurry as well, it's because I moved more during the long exposure. I brightened up the photo a bit to show you a little bit of us in the photo. The photo looks much brighter than the actual area was. It's like turning night into day. I actually couldn't even see Ken very easily to setup the photo framing. The Canon EOS has a bright back that blinded me before I looked in the viewfinder to frame the shot below.
(Above, 15 second exposure. I"m standing near the Vixen BT-80 and Ken is standing to my right. The comet is above my left shoulder. The comet was lower and dim in the clouds when we took this photo. You probably can't see it in the photo above. You will have to click on the photo to see the enlarged version of it.)
After the comet set, we started looking at some other objects. These included: the Moon and Jupiter close together, M45 nearby and of course the Orion Nebula. Ken then gave me a quick tour of a few objects before the clouds moved in. With fast arriving clouds, covering the sky, we were lucky to get any viewing in at all. Ken I'm sure has better observing notes and he was showing me many interesting things in the sky as clouds entered over the sky causing us to end the night earlier than we might have. We were driven from the field by the clouds.
Also:
M42 looked so amazing out there in dark skies compared to the bright skies of Allen Park and Lincoln Park. I really enjoy being in a darker sky for observing.
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