Thursday night I photographed a comet!

[thewayne]

Honest and truly! That green dot in the middle of the white circle? That's Comet 46P Wirtanen, and it's about 7 million miles from earth right now.


As usual, clicken to embiggen.

This was a 30 second exposure at f5.6 and an ISO of 1600 with my Canon 6D using a 28-135 zoom at 28mm. I was using my interval timer, this was just one frame that I grabbed. The star streak sequence wasn't that interesting as I wasn't pointed anywhere near the pole, so it was a streak mainly left to right with a slight bend.

Comments

[seasonoftowers]

Such a nice contrast with the bluish purple Pleiades and the orange Aldebaran! We're having terrible weather here, but I'm glad I got to see it a couple times

[thewayne]

I couldn't see it with my naked eye, but my wife's an astronomer and knew exactly where to help aim my camera.  She operates a 3.5 meter telescope and was featured on Mythbusters back in '08.  Our weather's just been cold, it was about 22f out there and aside from hands, we were pretty warmly dressed and had a large hot chocolate with us and were only out for about an hour.  Unfortunately we didn't capture any Pleiades streaks, but we were seeing them all through the evening, gorgeous viewing weather.  Really windy the previous couple of nights.

[moonhare]

Nice capture! I read about this comet a few days back but I won’t be searching it out.

I’ve seen a couple of random meteorites this week, totally by chance when out with the dog around 5:00 a.m. First one was Monday- I happened to be looking West at stars through the trees when a streak struck! Friday I had just looked up at the Big Dipper when another came by.

Unrelated, the coyotes set up another howl nearby this morning: so much yipping and yapping! This is the third time now I’ve heard this group, and imagine it goes on quite more often 5han I know.