[OzEclipse (Joe Cali)]

Originally Posted by MortonH

Very nice. Had some good visual views in Orange the last couple of nights but nothing like your images!

Thanks Morton. I'm pretty spoiled and left my property with its Bortle 2 skies to head out into the Bortle 1 zone to my west. Add to that, no local ambient light for most of the night and little passing traffic. Twilight negated the advantage for a while but eventually as twilight faded, I had an excellent view in a dark sky until the comet drifted down into the muck.

Orange now has a population of about 30000 and is getting to have a bit of a LP footprint. Even Mt Canobolas is a Bortle 3 now.

Originally Posted by Peter Ward

Nicely caught Joe

I was up at Wentworth Falls last night and am still going through the data (conditions were very hazy so nothing prolific). The system I was using vignetted more that I expected, so I'll have to get some post capture flats
(never easy)

It looked *very* faint to me. Not visible to the naked eye until 8.00pm...a recent NASA APOD sequence cleverly shows its size and brightness rapidly falling away. I doubt I'll make another trek to nab this one again.

Yes faint but the way I'm thinking is that the nucleus is fading as it moves away from the Sun, but the tail is old material and is why it's holding its own. I couldn't even see the nucleus or coma early on. But as twilight faded into darkness, and I had clear air down to a reasonably low altitude, I could see the nucleus and the tail. I referenced what I thought I could see to background stars and confirmed the tail location to my photos later. I couldn't see much more tail length in my 10x42ED or 15x70 binoculars.

Originally Posted by Retrograde

Nice work Joe!

Thanks Peter.


Some single wide angle images added to this post.

Cheers

Joe