Battle of Fire and Ice: C/2020 F3 Neowise
Comets are like us. We don’t know where we came from, we don’t know where we going. We melt under the sun, shining our path for a short while through an endless sea of darkness.
Manos Tzavaras
What brought me to astronomy almost seven years ago was a comet, that's why my logo is a comet. Comet Ison in fact. I fascinated from the reports about the Comet of the Century that media speculated that it would outshine the full Moon. I lost my sleep but i found a great hobby. So when i learnt about Neowise a day after perihelion my interest skyrocketed!
The following days i woke every single morning to watch it. Stargazing from city of Athens even in 4:00pm is really hard. I simply didn't make it to see him naked eye. But oh boy, in my 15x70 binoculars was spectacular! The gap between its two tails seem like splitting apart this little guy. The magnitude the early days must have been +1,5 mag i believe but you couldn’t estimate it because of the rising sun. I shot the comet for my observation log almost every day.
Comet C/2020 F3 Neowise 2020-07-11 04:49:26 stack of 20X2SEC ISO 1600, A7S
After four days in the row waking at 4:00 and then head to work started being difficult. But at the end of that week i was leaving for summer vacations so it was a good time to plan my shot. We would visit Elafonisos and stay at Simos camp with one of the best beaches in Greece. The odds for my shot started to look good. I tried to think about what image i wanted. For hours between the following days i was just day dreaming. I talked to my girl about my project and asked her to help me. She got hooked right away. I wanted a dreamy look in my image and she fit just perfectly. This digital artwork was my inspiration.
Shooting star: Tanka by artist Maitreni Mishra
Anyway the place was awesome. The sky at the north it wasn’t great but everything else was excellent. Bortle class two i guess. First day i scout the area and found some nice spots that might align well with the comet. Those were the days Neowise made its transition from morning to evening skies. The same night the comet was already too low and the sky still too bright but i grab a shot that help me to figure out where should i place my camera. The next two days 17/07-18/07 we did the shooting. My girlfriend did it marvelous and gave me plenty of shots to process. Below you can watch a small video with her and the comet.
Problems
Lens problem. The lens i used was a Jupiter 21M 200mm f4 made in the Soviet era and is the only lens i have above 85mm. I bought it from a fellow astrophotographer for 50 Euros. Its has some CA but it has coma well under control. The adapter for this lens is supposed to focus at infinity. It didn’t. My best guess is that the clear filter that was used for the mod is too thick. Anyway i had to fix it. The only way to bring down the adapter a few mm was to trim it. Anyway it must have taken one and a half hour to complete it but i wasn’t sure if i had it right. The night before i leave for vacation i checked it on Vega. It was ok but because of the weight of the lens (2 kilos!) image was bouncing all over making focusing really tough. You can understand my frustration in the field when i realized that i had to take two shots for focus stacking! The focus in the foreground was easily done but for the comet i wasn’t exactly sure if i had nailed it. When i saw the pictures in my monitor relief came to me. Some were ok, some a bit soft.
M42 Adapter after fine tuning with sandpaper!
I had several problems before and while shooting. Most of the foreground shots were 2 sec and more at iso 8000. When my model had to perform an off-balance move her shot came out blurry. The sand hill is not a good place to stay still. So we were shooting again and again. In some shots she did it but the bushes around her was blurry as the off shore wind was strong at times. While we were trying to nail it the comet kept its descending so the window to get the comet to the right place was closing..
My first plan was to make an image with landscape orientation, some negative space and the comet. There were two problems but i went for it anyway. The big mountain behind the hill was showing in my frame and i couldn’t get my tripod lower to exclude it. Secondly the comet’s tail was really long so i also shoot the comet in portrait. I couldn’t move from the spot cause i had already made polar alignment. Anyway i think that the portrait orientation of the final images is more powerful. My a7s is modded that means that a red cast appears in all of my images. I have created three different inside the camera custom white balance profiles. When i switched to that purple profile i liked it a lot. This one was very close to what i wanted.
Multiple shots fired. Not every shot hit the target. But we kept trying.
Focusing on the comet for focus stack.
Changing to portrait mode
Processing
Well, i am not an expert in Ps but i am not a noob either. Things were really easy. I took the foreground shots that i liked and combined them with the sharpest comet shot i had. I made masks for the foreground as best as could using the offset and brightness-contrast, and then i blend the two exposures with gradient tool. I turned the white balance of the comet towards the blue and a tiny bit the foreground to purple-magenta. I used curves to raise the contrast to the comet and i lower the shadows to the foreground. An orton effect was used on the comet, dust removal, some sharpenin and that was all.
Making of Make a Wish!
Gear Used
Manfrotto tripod
Jupiter 21M 200mm f4, 1975
Sony a7s modded
SkyWatcher star adventurer full kit
I have process multiple images. Some of them are below.
The biggest present to me was that all of a sudden i realize i could see it naked eye! I was shooting 30 second exposures to the comet when i saw him. The sky was dark enough making the comet show up like a star with a tail! I almost didn’t believe it! Along with a good shot, a wish came true. So the name of the image is.. make a wish!
Sony a7s mod, 2 image focus stack, girl 2sec iso 8000, comet 20sec iso 2000 blended in Ps.
