Nature above
Nature around us does not consist only of animals, plants, waters or land we can see and touch. In fact everything we know on Earth represents only a tiny fraction of it. Do you need a proof? Well, just look up! Astronomy and astrophysics are fascinating science fields which excel especially in putting things in perspective. It is rather difficult to justify any significance of everyday things and events face to face to incomprehensible wonders of space. There is so much out there! And lets face it: if the Earth and all of its inhabitants did not exist, the Universe would not even notice…
As a matter of fact, my amateur interest in astrophysics brought me to the photography itself. About seven years ago I bought my first telescope and started with initial attempts in astrophotography. However, I soon realized how difficult endeavour it was. This kind of photography is one of the most challenging when it comes to skills, specialized equipment and image post-processing. At that time it was way above my “pay-grade”. And it kind of still is, even though I hope I can slowly come back to it utilizing some of the experiences I gained in regular photography during the past years.
And these days provided perfect opportunity for it! You have probably heard about the recent discovery of new comet called NEOWISE (its name is derived from the name of the telescope which was used for it and its mission: NEO stands for Near-Earth Object and WISE stands for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer). It has also more romantic name - C/2020 F3 and it is even supposed to be the brightest comet in last 13 years! I can tell you firsthand - what a beauty she is!
When I first heard about it I instantly knew, that I will need to dust off my (not so good) astrophotography skills and at least try to capture it. However, it soon became clear how much I forgot (and how much I never knew). Probably every landscape photographer will tell you how important part of it consist of proper planning. And that goes double for astrophotography. Except the suitable whether conditions, finding appropriate location and precise timing is extremely crucial! Images above are great example of that.
When I checked the weather forecast on Thursday night last week I looked up the comet in Stellarium, which is one of the most useful astronomy computer program I know (you can download the app for your PC here for free). That gave me an idea when the comet would be visible and where I could find it in the sky. After that I chose an approximate location with acceptably dark skies. For that I used light pollution map. Eventually I knew I had to be at the location near town of Staňkov at 3 am looking northeast. So far so good. Because of the early hour of planned photoshoot I decided to drive there the evening before, find the precise spot to take the pictures from and get some sleep in the car beforehand.
And so I did just that. But at that moment things started to go south. The problem was that I have never actually tried to do astrophotography at dawn. The thing is that when you want to start shooting at the beginning of the night, you have to wait for the dark and then - there is dark. Obviously. But since this was a morning shoot I simply didn’t realize how little time I would have before the sky becomes too bright. My mistake that day was that I started with wide angle shots. Even though I managed to take rather nice landscape picture (image No. 1 above) the comet is barely visible on it. By the time I switched to telephoto, there was not much to see at all. And the result was underwhelming to say at least (image No. 4). So a bit out of desperation I tried to save the day by taking another photograph of the pond during sunrise. That turned out quite fine (image No. 2), but I couldn’t help myself not to feel disappointed. Especially after not so comfortable night in the car and a bit unpleasant incident when some guy mistaken me for a poacher (well, I can’t really blame him, since I was afterall standing alone by the pond in the night with bunch of weird looking gear around me).
So it was clear I had to go for another try. Because of the weather forecast I chose to go out few days later on Sunday. And this time I tried my best to do things properly. I am pretty sure that I will play with the data I collected that night some more in upcoming days and that you have probably already seen far better photographs of Neowise on the internet, but so far I am quite satisfied with the result (image No. 3). I love the way the picture captures the comet's split tail on the late evening sky (since my first attempt the comet started to be acceptably visible even at around 11 pm). The picture itself consists of 24 photographs with ten second exposure each (this technique called stacking is very common in astrophotography and resulted – in this case – in cumulative exposure time of 4 minutes), 20 so called dark frames and 20 so called bias frames (these help to reduce digital noise caused by high ISO and noise caused by heat on the sensor during repeated long exposures). For stacking I used program called Deep Sky Stacker which is very popular among astrophotographers.
Well, at the end I would say that despite my initial failure this story ended quite ok, because I was able to take some nice pictures. But most importantly, when I watched the comet on my own eyes during the shoot I felt that I just witnessed something extraordinary. And such feeling is priceless! By the way, there is still time for you to go out and see for yourselves…
