Comet Neowise has been visible in the night sky for several nights after being discovered in late March. In the last couple of weeks, Neowise has been visible in the evening skies rather than in the morning skies. On Sunday night, we headed out to Bennett to view the comet. We found a location about 15 miles north of Bennett and proceeded to search for Neowise. After a few minutes of scanning the night sky with binoculars, we found the comet with a long tail streaming away from the sun. I managed to make one decent image of Neowise.
The image above was over-exposed, but I managed to make a reasonable image after post-processing. I had not setup my camera correctly to preview the captured image. The biggest challenge of night photography is to focus the lens at infinity. I had also failed to do this successfully, so the stars and comet are not perfectly sharp.
Yesterday, I prepared my camera well beforehand to focus on infinity and taped the lens to lock the focus. I headed back towards Bennett. There was a bank of clouds to north of I-70, so I headed south on the road towards Kiowa. This would increase the separation between the clouds and comet. Having found a convenient stop, I setup and pointed towards the faint crescent of the new moon as it was setting towards the mountains. I used this to opportunity to check and tweak the infinity focus. The waiting game then started… While waiting for Neowise to become visible, several thunderstorms were lighting up the cloud bank to the north. In this image, I managed to capture the glow from lightning strikes inside the clouds.
After waiting for the night sky to darken, comet Neowise started to become visible. During the next hour, I made several images of the comet. The thunderstorm was busy lighting up the cloud bank to the north. In this image, I was fortunate to capture the comet with the thunderstorm lighting up the cloud bank.
In this final image, I just included comet Neowise and the night sky.
The comet can be seen after the sun has set in the north-west of the sky. As the moon becomes brighter and rises in the sky, the comet will be more difficult to see during the coming week,