Earlier today, I got up at 3:30 AM to head to a hilltop vantage point about ten miles from my house to catch a glimpse of comet NEOWISE...one of the brightest comets to light up our sky this century. Ever since it made and survived its closest approach to the Sun on July 3, NEOWISE has been getting a lot brighter—to the point where you don't need a telescope or binoculars to spot the celestial object (though they would obviously still be useful in doing so). You need to wake up early like I did through this weekend to catch this beautiful spectacle in the sky; it will be on July 15 that you can start seeing NEOWISE in the evening! It will be visible (to the northwest) about an hour after sunset.
I'm so stoked to have taken these shots of NEOWISE with my Nikon D3300 DSLR camera, but needless to say, I definitely want to head back out because I can do better! Assuming that the comet doesn't start fizzling out as I type this, it should be getting brighter and higher in the night sky over the rest of this month...making it easier to photograph. It will be on July 22 that NEOWISE will make its closest approach to Earth (at a distance of 64.3 million miles, or 103.5 million kilometers), so I definitely need to try to take pictures on that night. In regards to my camera settings, this is what my Nikon D3300 was set to for these images:
Lens: 70-300mm Nikon telephoto lens
ISO: 800
F-stop: f/5.6
Shutter speed: 2.5 seconds
Live View mode on my LCD screen used instead of the viewfinder
And in case you're wondering, the first two photos are slanted because I was standing on the slope of a hill. I didn't have time to level my camera's tripod as NEOWISE was fast emerging above the San Gabriel Mountains here in California while the sky was getting brighter. Happy Friday!
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