Community work: Comet NEOWISE
Comet NEOWISE, the most impressive comet of the century so far captured by Telescope Live Community.
C/2020 F3 NEOWISE, also called Comet NEOWISE, was first spotted in late March of this year by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission. According to NASA, the comet’s nucleus is about 3 miles in diameter and composed of dust, rock and frozen gases left over from the birth of our solar system around 4.6 billion years ago.
C/2020 F3 NEOWISE by Ian Howarth
NEOWISE has been easy to see with the naked eye in July and is a splendid sight in binoculars. Although comet-brightness predictions are notoriously unreliable (and often wildly optimistic!), there's a good chance that it will continue to be readily visible for some days to come.
Finder charts and brightness updates are widely available on the internet (e.g., https://theskylive.com/c2020f3-info or http://www.cometwatch.co.uk/comet-neowise-c-2020-f3).
The comet is too big to be well observed with the Telescope Live instruments, but a standard DSLR should capture nice pictures, especially if mounted on a tripod to allow exposures of several seconds. The accompanying images were taken with an APS sensor, ISO 800, 6s at 18mm/f3.5 (wide field), and a stack of 4-s exposures at 150mm/f2.8.
C/2020 F3 NEOWISE by Erik Bryssinck
On July 22nd Erik was able to use the LHiResIII spectrograph for the first time to make an observation of the Na emission in high resolution (R=15000). Unfortunately, those Na-lines have almost completely disappeared.
On July 11th Erik Bryssinck took some pictures, with my DSLR, during the night on a dike at the river 'De Schelde'.
Unfortunately the comet was too low to be observed the remote telescopes.
C/2020 F3 NEOWISE by Nick Martin
Comet Neowise took by Nick Martin on 21 July at 00:00UT using a 135 mm f.l. f3.5 telephoto lens.
The picture is composed of 20 10 second exposures, stacked with Deep Sky Stacker and further processed in Photoshop. The background brighter sky (no true darkness in Ayrshire Scotland at this time of year) was reduced by making a 900-pixel Gaussian blur and subtracting that from the image.
C/2020 F3 NEOWISE by Xesko Toldrà
Comet Neowise by Xesko Toldrà taken from Calaf, near Barcelona, Spain on 18th July at 21:30 UTC. It's made from 60frames x30 seconds each one was taken with a DSLR Full Frame at 150mm focal length, f/5.6 and ISO400, stacked with Deep Sky Stacker and processed with Pixinsight LE.
Want to be featured in our blog? Send us your images of C/2020 F3 NEOWISE at hello@telescope.live