Panstarrs was viewed in Allen Park on the Hill today, last minute quick trip out worked out.

I fell asleep being tired yesterday afternoon.  I thought that the clouds would likely hamper viewing.  I started to have some kind of dream about a comet or sci-fi or something and my phone was ringing or making a noise so I woke up.  It was 7:20.  I looked out of the window, the sky was mostly clear with some clouds in the west and clouds were moving around.  There was some haze.  Maybe I could get a glimpse of the comet.

I rushed out and grabbed a few items, not enough to do a full setup and I didn't have time to notify most of the FAAC members or even get up to the hill in Allen Park to setup much equipment or do much planning.  I didn't even grab all the winter gear I should have grabbed considering the strong wind gusts that would hit us on the hill.  I tried to call a few people who I thought might be close enough to make it up to the hill.  This was clearly an unplanned last minute desperate attempt to see the comet.  Would it be out there and would we see it?

I'll write a better text and perhaps have better pictures later as it's late and I spent a little bit of time processing very lightly a few JPEG images I took with my Canon EOS camera. 

The wind was brutal and we were feeling like we'd be getting frostbite while viewing.  I had only one glove and a sock I grabbed and used as a glove for a brief time from my car.  

Only Rick and Dan both FAAC members could make it from the locals I notified.  I know I was leaving a few out and probably forgot a few as I was in so much of a rush.

I called a few who were further away and might be able to look at the comet from their local area.  I don't know how well they did, some being far from a good horizon, likely missed tonights show.

I didn't take all the tripods and took far fewer telescopes.  I had the Vixen BT-80 and it's sturdy mount. The mainstay for the evening.

And I had my small binoculars.  The 7 by 35 and 10 by 50 binoculars seemed useless at first because the sky was to bright and they didn't have the light gathering power of the Vixen BT-80 binoculars.  It was something that merited wide field and big optics.  The wind would have played havoc with any large or even middle sized dob and we wished we had a large panel truck or van as a kind of wind block but everyone who arrived had a car, so the wind pummeled us while we viewed the comet.

I spotted the comet at first through the Vixen Binocular telescope.  We looked with other smaller binoculars but could not pick up the comet in the bright sky until the sky grew darker.

Jets from the local airspace would at times pass through the field of view of the binoculars as we could see the comet in the same field of view.  That was pretty cool.  I wished I had a video of that from the telescope perspective.  

Well enough writing for now.  It looks like it will be clear early in the evening Thursday and some of us will be out there in Allen Park again to try to get a view or take photos, or both.

Here are some photos.  I didn't process the RAW photos I took and some of these didn't turn out as good as they might have had I spent the time to setup and had better camera equipment.  I was very excited at the event and spent time doing many things trying to make sure people could get a visual view.  A F4 or F5 small wide field telescope on a good mount that could withstand the wind would have been nice, and would be nice tomorrow.  

A narrow field telescope with a good power eyepiece might show nice detail in the comet and it's coma, but of course less wide field view of the tail of the comet.

I thought at first I didn't catch any of the comet with the wide field shots and tried to get a few shots thorough the binocular telescope afocal using handheld techniques, which are less than ideal.  My Canon EOS was set to 4 seconds for the manual exposure through the BT-80 and being hand held that caused a shake in the photo and blurring with many comet heads.   This was a poor picture.  It looked okay in the cold off the back of the camera, but I thought it was likely blurred and it was.

Note although the picture above is imperfect, I'd appreciate you not posting it unless it's properly captioned as it's a poor representation of the comet and not a true one.  Please include my name in any post and explain it's a blurred 4 second handheld test photo and the comet was "NOT" breaking up.

It turned out this was blurred, what would we expect from a 4 second handheld photo.  This may not be an accurate image of what the comet looked like technically due to the multiple blurred images, but it gives a pretty good idea of the scale of the comet as we looked at it through the BT-80.  It was pretty cool looking.  The comet also looked more like a blurred and moving star as it was almost gone near the horizon and the tail disappeared as the haze and thick view through the atmosphere made it appear more star like and the tail became fainter.  This after the comet was below the 3 degree point above the horizon.

We could joke about seeing the comet split apart, but the image of multiple heads of the comet are just due to camera shake during the 4 second shot through the eyepiece.  

Early on I took some wide field shots.  Not knowing if the comet would be visible and never finding the image when quickly reviewing the comet in the field.  It was so cold out, we didn't have time to view the photos in the field.  This photo looks darker, because the exposure is darker, not because it was taken later in the evening than the other brighter exposures below it.  I wanted to take some photos of the moon with it more properly exposed and perhaps layer those with brighter images that showed more of the comet later.  I haven't layered these yet, but made a few basic adjustments to show you this photo.   

The comet was barely visible at this time.  Probably not through any 10 by 50 binocular we had, maybe through the BT-80 binocular.  Certainly not naked eye and the camera barely picked up the comet as a blur or smudge above the blur of the airplane.  This exposure was 1/6th of a second, so it's underexposed, and the comet barely shows up as a faint small smudge above the smudge of the jet.

The photo below is better and shows more of the comet, but it's still not zoomed in enough to show much of the detail that we saw through the BT-80.  It gives a little more detail. A longer exposure might have helped bring out more detail, but would also brighten the sky and I was using a fixed tripod.  Maybe tomorrow I'll get better photos.

Of course the moon is blown out in this exposure.  

Below is a crop from the photo above.  Very little processing was done using preview for these photos. I wished I had a better photo rig and more time to get more photos.  Many of my photos of the group of people viewing were also not to good, as the cold and short time was a distraction from getting much in the way of good framing or setting people up to pose for a photo.

That's it for now.  

Hopefully we'll get more and better photos of the comet to post soon.  I'm pretty happy.  Rick said this was the first comet he viewed.  Rick, Erin and I went to HJRO afterwards but didn't spend to much time and the mount was giving us problems at the observatory.  We didn't spend to much time observing afterwards.  That's a different story, but we gave Erin a quick tour of the place and looked at Jupiter and M42.