Astrophotography: Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)

Comets are one my most favorite celestial objects.    It always brings back one of my most vivid memories of childhood.  My dad and I were fish gigging on a creek that ran through our farm in 1997.   As we left that night and came up into an open pasture, Comet Hale-Bopp was one of the most surreal images I have ever seen.  The tail of that comet spanned what felt like half the sky.    I wish I had been able to take a photograph of the sky that night and see that image one more time.

Ever since that comet I have always kept an eye out for the next big comet.  We have had a few that looked like they may have potential only to fizzle out.  There are always comets in our night sky and a couple I have taken photos of with my telescope, but even with a scope they are far way and don't manifest a great tail.  

Then Comet NEOWISE came in 2020.  It was one of the first naked eye comets I really remember seeing since Hale-Bopp.   Comet NEOWISE still pales in comparison to Hale-Bopp, but if you can see a comet with the naked eye even if just barely, then it makes a good photo target with a telescope.

Comet NEOWISE did not stay around very long, but over the summer I was able to get a few images snapped while it was still close to our sun and putting out a tail.   

Stacking multiple comet photos are a bit trickier since the comet is moving much faster relative to the stars in background.  After stacking and processing here is my final picture.

I post all my astrophotography pictures on Astrobin.   Here is the technical card with a bit more detailed info on the picture. 

Here is a bit more info on the comet itself from Wikipedia

I spent a lot of time processing the final picture which consists of multiple stacks of a long exposure picture of the comet.   It is always a balance of pulling out all the detail of the image while not over saturating the image with noise from light pollution.  

As I worked through different processing workflows here were the iterations where I kept trying to pull more detail to get to the final picture.