Hunting Lovejoy
For the last week I've been trying to get a decent image of C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy but, alas, the weather is bad: Too many clouds, to much mist in the upper atmosphere and additionally I'm too close to the city. Nonetheless I've made some nice pictures of other objects, Jupiter and some of it's moons for example.
On January 7th you could not have missed Jupiter as it was just to the right of the Moon. It is fairly bright and it sported two of it's moons very prominently. I took these pictures with my new Nikon D610 (cranked up to ISO 3200) and an rather old Tamron 28-300mm lens, so anyone with a pair of binoculars could have seen almost the same. The image on the right shows the region where Lovejoy should be visible if there was less mist. On the left you can see the very prominent constellation of Orion, the bright star in the centre is Aldebaran, the brightest star in the constellation Taurus, and further to the right the Plejades are visible. Lovejoy should be somewhere on the bottom of this image taken on January 10th, when I tried to find it for the second time.
On the same day I took another photo of Jupiter, this time with three moons visible. (The third one is rather faint but visible nonetheless.) Then I went looking for the comet again but could not find it. The centre image shows the same constellations as before, but as you can see, there is still far too much humidity in the atmosphere (and too much diffuse light). The last picture was taken on the 12th and shows a (shaky) image of the Orion nebula (diffuse spots in the middle).
So, no luck seeing Lovejoy. But I have not given up - it will still be visible for the rest of January and as it climbs higher over the horizon it might even get better. So, you can expect more photos of stars and planets from me!
On January 7th you could not have missed Jupiter as it was just to the right of the Moon. It is fairly bright and it sported two of it's moons very prominently. I took these pictures with my new Nikon D610 (cranked up to ISO 3200) and an rather old Tamron 28-300mm lens, so anyone with a pair of binoculars could have seen almost the same. The image on the right shows the region where Lovejoy should be visible if there was less mist. On the left you can see the very prominent constellation of Orion, the bright star in the centre is Aldebaran, the brightest star in the constellation Taurus, and further to the right the Plejades are visible. Lovejoy should be somewhere on the bottom of this image taken on January 10th, when I tried to find it for the second time.
On the same day I took another photo of Jupiter, this time with three moons visible. (The third one is rather faint but visible nonetheless.) Then I went looking for the comet again but could not find it. The centre image shows the same constellations as before, but as you can see, there is still far too much humidity in the atmosphere (and too much diffuse light). The last picture was taken on the 12th and shows a (shaky) image of the Orion nebula (diffuse spots in the middle).
So, no luck seeing Lovejoy. But I have not given up - it will still be visible for the rest of January and as it climbs higher over the horizon it might even get better. So, you can expect more photos of stars and planets from me!