Roshan Radhakrishnan

Approach

Of the many things to happen in 2020, the passing of Comet NEOWISE may have seemed small, or distant (to be fair, the comet was distant – about 100 million kilometers, or 100 gigameters, away from Earth). This once in a 6700 year event was over before I knew it, but luckily I was able to snag my camera and attempt to capture the comet.

My camera is a Sony A6000 with a 16mm Sigma lens. I bought this camera and lens about a year ago, and have been trying my hand at some nature and night sky photography since then. I’ll try to post about it more often now that I’ve resurrected this blog from the depths of my bookmarks folder. The setup for these photos consisted of me standing on my balcony with the camera pointed up and north on its tripod.

Capture

I was pleasantly surprised at the visibility of NEOWISE in the above photo. Given the amount of light pollution in Seattle, and the massive construction cranes, it is pretty neat that the lens was able to resolve a tiny (~5 km wide) comet about 100 million kilometers away. I didn’t use a very long exposure (2.5sec), but I did use a larger aperture (f/2.2) to capture more light. I’ll note that no matter how hard I tried, I could not see NEOWISE with the naked eye. It took a bit of contrast boosting and other minor edits of the raw image file to bring out the comet and its tail.

Ursa major, along with the big dipper, are also pretty visible in the pictures. I did not expect to see most of Ursa major with that level of clarity either. I’m impressed with how bright it came out after editing. Overall, I’m pleased with what I was able to capture. It isn’t often that you get to see a comet at night, especially in a city. Getting to see, and capture, the light reflected off of an object hurtling away from the sun about 100 million kilometers away is incredible. See you in 6700 years, NEOWISE.