{"id":9713,"date":"2013-12-14T00:00:11","date_gmt":"2013-12-14T08:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/?p=9713"},"modified":"2013-12-17T12:09:30","modified_gmt":"2013-12-17T20:09:30","slug":"december-14-2013-comet-lovejoy-from-wlv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/2013\/12\/14\/december-14-2013-comet-lovejoy-from-wlv\/","title":{"rendered":"December 14, 2013 Comet Lovejoy from WLV"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"13Dec14_8447_Lovejoy\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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The big comet event of the century (Comet ISON) was a dismal flop, but there is another comet currently “visible” in the northeast before sunrise.\u00a0 It is “Comet Lovejoy”, and it rises in the constellation Hercules an hour or two before the first light of dawn.\u00a0 It is very dim, likely only visible with the naked eye from the darkest places.\u00a0\u00a0 With clear skies expected on Friday, December 13, I set my alarm to 5:20 a.m. in order to photograph it.\u00a0 I got out of bed at that horrible time of the morning and went into the area behind my condo with the tripod and camera.\u00a0 The skies were nice and clear, and it was calm and cold, about 33F.\u00a0 I had a fairly decent idea where to look —- low to the horizon to the ENE.\u00a0 Well, I couldn’t find the darn comet, even with the binoculars.\u00a0 To make a long story short, I took several images with the 70-200mm lens, pointing it towards where I THOUGHT the comet should be.\u00a0 And, lo and behold, it appeared in a couple of shots!\u00a0 But, it was getting brighter to the east by now (around 5:50 a.m.).\u00a0 This, coupled with the city glow in that direction, too, meant that I was done with comet photography on this morning.\u00a0 The image that I did get was slightly out of focus and the comet was not centered, so I needed to try to again on the 14th.<\/p>\n

Saturday morning went much better (and it was a comfortable 50F!).\u00a0 I got up a bit earlier and knew exactly where to look for Lovejoy.\u00a0 Again, I could not see it with the binoculars, but it showed up in my first image.\u00a0 The comet was just to the right of Zeta Herculis, a star at magnitude +2.8 and the “bottom-right” star of the familiar trapezoid of Hercules.\u00a0 (I.e., “bottom-right” when Hercules is high in the sky, and “upper-right when it is rising in the east!)\u00a0 I took a bunch of images with the 5D and the lens zoomed all of the way to 200mm.\u00a0 The best settings seemed to be around f3.2, ISO 1600, 6-to-10 second exposures.\u00a0 Any exposures longer than that, and the star trails were a little too obnoxious.\u00a0 The city-light glow to the east, from the San Fernando Valley, probably overwhelmed some of the faint light of the comet’s tail.\u00a0 Still, the tail is very obvious, and I am happy with the results given the light pollution nearby.<\/p>\n

The image above shows M13, the bright globular cluster in Hercules.\u00a0 It is near the left edge at a magnitude of 5.8, about the same as the comet on this morning.\u00a0 The final image, below, includes the streak of a satellite that is in orbit around Earth.<\/p>\n

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\"13Dec14_8440_Lovejoy\"<\/a> \"13Dec14_8443_Lovejoy\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  The big comet event of the century (Comet ISON) was a dismal flop, but there is another comet currently “visible” in the northeast before… [Read More]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[54,21],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9713","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-54","7":"category-astronomy","8":"entry","9":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9713"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9722,"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9713\/revisions\/9722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stormbruiser.com\/chase\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}