The comet is still getting brighter. I picked it up easily in the 50mm finder even with the bright moon near by. Here's a stack of 4 x 10sec exposures @iso1600 taken on the evening of 1/1/15. (10" f4.8 newt)
Probably a bit of both Pete. Moonlight kills tails but to be honest it's tail never was that bright. Not unless you're flying along side of it in the UFO that some of these dudes use for photography!
No Moon is a MUST to have a chance of seeing the tail.
The night I vewed Lovejoy the Moon set at 1:30am. Before then while it was up only the coma could be seen. Once the Moon was gone and no trace of glow was visible from the horizon, only then was I able to make out the tail. Very painfully faint, but the detail became noticeable with time.
Also, your best chance to see the tail is to drop the aperture and the magnification. A rich field scope is your best friend here. The tail needs a generous true field of view to be seen. The TFOV of the scope & EP combination I used is 5° - massive really. 25X80 binos could have a chance as you are using both eyes, but the field of view of these is closer to 2.5°. In my 4" f/5 refractor with an ES 30mm 82° eyepiece, I'm getting only 17X magnification. This is one of those situations where a RFT comes into its own. Aperture grunt or high magnification and a narrow TFOV just stands no chance.
No Moon is a MUST to have a chance of seeing the tail.
The night I vewed Lovejoy the Moon set at 1:30am. Before then while it was up only the coma could be seen. Once the Moon was gone and no trace of glow was visible from the horizon, only then was I able to make out the tail. Very painfully faint, but the detail became noticeable with time.
Also, your best chance to see the tail is to drop the aperture and the magnification. A rich field scope is your best friend here. The tail needs a generous true field of view to be seen. The TFOV of the scope & EP combination I used is 5° - massive really. 25X80 binos could have a chance as you are using both eyes, but the field of view of these is closer to 2.5°. In my 4" f/5 refractor with an ES 30mm 82° eyepiece, I'm getting only 17X magnification. This is one of those situations where a RFT comes into its own. Aperture grunt or high magnification and a narrow TFOV just stands no chance.
Alex, were your visual tail obs with a dark sky or in suburbia sir?
DARK SITE TOO. My observation was done from Hill End in NSW, some 4hrs west of Sydney - nice dark sky there.
My apology for the omission of this crucial bit of info.
haha that's ok! after appearing on a few news websites a few people have asked me how to find it. i said guys, its just a fuzzy blob to the eye. sadly the average joe doesnt care for anything less than , especially with a comet that has no readily visible tail
Can someone please tell me how to find or better still give me the day-to-day coordinates of the comet pretty please? I want to try my luck photographing it. Never imaged comets before (been doing mostly nebulas) I presume the exposure time will be much shorter. Any tips appreciated.
Can someone please tell me how to find or better still give me the day-to-day coordinates of the comet pretty please? I want to try my luck photographing it. Never imaged comets before (been doing mostly nebulas) I presume the exposure time will be much shorter. Any tips appreciated.
I downloaded the free version of stellarium (for PC)
There are plug ins to place comets and other objects in the field, including Lovejoy.
It updates position in real time.
Can someone please tell me how to find or better still give me the day-to-day coordinates of the comet pretty please? I want to try my luck photographing it. Never imaged comets before (been doing mostly nebulas) I presume the exposure time will be much shorter. Any tips appreciated.
I used SkySafari Plus on my Android phone to locate it from my Auckland CBD apartment last night. The sky was extremely light-polluted, as one would expect, and I could only see Aldebaran, Zaurak and the fuzz of Pleiades with the naked eye in that part of the sky. Luckily the comet wasn't too far from Zaurak so I was able to target that, then sweep the sky to the right and downwards with my 10" dob and 26mm eyepiece to locate it. It appeared as it does in some of the sketches I've seen online; a tiny point of light surrounded by a reasonably large fuzzy area. I had to check SkySafari to make sure I hadn't landed on a globular cluster in the area by accident...
Oops! Yes, a bit of an oversight...
