Since our attempt to view the comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) this past weekend wasn’t exactly successful, we tried to view it locally tonight. This time, we had better luck!
Although this isn’t a particularly interesting image of the comet, we’re happy that we were at least able to capture it!
The biggest challenge we had was that we started pretty late, around 7:30pm, so there wasn’t much time to find a good location to see the comet. We decided to go to a local school as we figured there would be plenty of room to get away from the trees. We didn’t consider the extremely bright lights in the school’s parking lot as well as on the building itself. It made any sort of night vision impossible.
We had some idea of where the comet should be though. We went to the school’s field where we could get further away from the lights and the trees. While we were never able to see the comet with our own vision, our smartphone cameras picked it up instantly. This allowed us to point our camera with 400mm lens at the comet.
Photographing the comet was pretty easy as it was bright enough for manual focus, though it was too dim for autofocus. The tree in the photo is out of focus because it is too close to the camera. Using the depth of field calculator in the PhotoPills app, it can be determined that when focusing at something extremely far away like the comet with our gear, anything less than half a kilometer or so away will be out of focus. The tree was definitely not that far away!