Finally had a really clear night. The comet has lost intensity in the head. I estimate magnitude 4.5 but I could still faintly see about 14 degrees of tail naked eye for a short time when the comet was still higher altitude.
We all make mistakes. I live on the east side of a hill. My house has sweeping views from NE through East to SSW. So I drove 10 km out to a location on a quiet country road and set up my telescope in a mere 13mins 45s. I used one of my solar eclipse daytime polar alignment techniques so I was ready to shoot at dusk.
I did a 40s test exposure to test the polar alignment. The result was long trails. I checked all the mounting settings. Another test exposure, same result. WHAT'S WRONG???? Then it hit me. My camera tracks the stars internally by shifting the image stabilizer. A feature called Pentax ASTROTRACER. I'd left that function activated so the mount was tracking AND my camera was also tracking with the sensor giving me double sidereal speed. It's always worth testing the gear before you blindly acquire images.
While out on this country road enjoying the comet on my own, I had some extended phone calls with some good friends. Greg, at Blackbutt in SE Qld, whom I've been friends with for 46 years, David (Prickly) who was with Phil Jones(scribbly ) outside Canberra, also friends for 46 years and Phil Jones, friends for a little bit less than 46 years.
When I were a lad, I'd read accounts of some of the great comets of the 1950's and 1960's. I was always particularly struck by B&W pictures in books of the spiked anti tail of one of those great comets-Arend-Roland(1956).
As luck would have it, not one opportunity presented itself to me for the next 46 years. But tonight, I finally nabbed a comet with an anti tail.
I was there for 4 hrs in total. In all that time only one vehicle came past and that was after I finished my run. The farmer stopped to ask if I was OK. I told him I was just taking some pictures of the night sky. I'll definitely use that location again for low western horizon shooting. My property is on the east side of a hill so my west horizon isn't great.
The first image is a stack from the first sequence I captured as twilight was progressing. The second image is from a sequence where the subs had 4 x the exposure of the previous image sequence, possible when it became darker.
