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Saw it again tonight - first picked it up in binoculars at 8:15pm in blue sky, and it was faintly visible naked-eye at that stage, with very faint tail. Got better & better - ran around to a mate's place to get him to have a look and ended up with a fair crowd! No-one had any trouble spotting it naked eye and seeing the tail by that stage, even kids (or maybe I should say 'even adults'?) - the sky was still so light that there were no stars visible within cooee of it so it was very easy to point out.
One young boy asked me how far away it was - when I told him it was getting fairly close to the Sun now he seemed most surprised. I think he thought it was something in our atmosphere! Binocular views were great, the small inner coma (false nucleus) is so intense.
As the comet moves sunward we're getting a better view of it from here as it is setting against lower & lower hills. But hills are hills and we can't see it down into the horizon unfortunately, maybe to somewhere round 5-6 degrees tonight. Kept imagining what it would look like in a dark sky!
After PANSTARRS had set & the sky had darkened I had a look at C/2012 F6 (Lemmon) through binoculars - nice, but unfortunately it has now moved into town skyglow from our end of town and there is no chance of a naked-eye sighting.
Attached is an image I took last night of the comet head, using a NexImage webcam through a 4.5" f8 reflector. The width of the frame is 14 arcminutes. I could imagine some of the planetary imagers on IIS getting cracker shots of the head, not that there's much time left!
Cheers -
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