Comet NEOWISE C/2020 F3 provided us an unexpected celestial spectacle during the summer of 2020 making up for disappointments of fragmenting Comet Atlas (link below) and far-southerly Comet Swan months earlier. Discouraged from traveling by the COVID pandemic, those of us living in southerly latitudes in the US, such as us at 29.4N at Chiefland Astronomy Village in Florida, were frustrated viewing comet NEOWISE in the early dawn sky twilight because of the comet’s northerly position. The beautiful blue ion tail of NEOWISE we had seen in photos from elsewhere was buried in morning twilight for us until the comet became an evening object climbing high into Ursa Major where we could appreciate the true majesty of this comet.
Below are images from the mornings of July 9, 12th and 13th as NEOWISE hopelessly bathed in dawn twilight. We were pleasantly surprised, however, by a visit by a green fireball on the morning of July 13th in the region of the comet! Images below were taken with a 100mm diameter Vixen f3.8 refractor, a 0.37M RCOS Ritchey-Chretien telescope and a Canon 60Da DSLR with 55mm lens. Close-up images of the comet nucleus and coma on July 9th taken with the RCOS showed an asymmetric coma which raised the possibility of early fragmentation which fortunately never materialized.
Comet NEOWISE path moved far enough west to become an evening object by mid month. We first detected the comet on the evening of July 16th. And as it moved more southerly, those of us in Florida could appreciate the bright long comet naked eye and capture the blue ion tail photographically. Florida summer astronomers routinely dodge thunderstorms and the evening of July 20th was no exception. A huge anvil cumulonimbus cloud parked in the eastern Gulf of Mexico provided a lightning show while NEOWISE blazed in the northeast, a spectacle we dubbed “Fire and Ice”. The brilliant southern Milky Way with Jupiter and Saturn vied for attention as fireflies mimicked meteors! And we enjoyed all this with family and friends. What a gift from the heavens!
Conclusion: I never expected to capture the comet’s blue ion tail extending over 20 degrees in length when sandwiched between nearby Gulf of Mexico thunderstorm lightning and Chiefland light pollution dome in the northwest. But there it is blazing past the Owl Nebula captured with a Canon 60DA DSLR riding ten minutes atop RCOS telescope on July 20th. Additionally, the Vixen refractor captured the wide dust fan in ten minutes on July 19th tracked on the comet nucleus. I included a mirror-reversed version of the Vixen image strictly for aesthetic purposes. On August 5th, the comet passed globular clusters M53 and NGC 5053 in the constellation Coma Berenices.
Evening – August 9th
Conclusion: The night of August 9th, 2020, presented a unique opportunity to capture 2 comets in one refractor field. Comets NEOWISE and PANSTARRS were only about 3 degrees apart straddling the Vigro/Bootes border at only 18 degrees elevation.
