Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="RandyDSok" data-source="post: 176739" data-attributes="member: 201">That's a million dollar question. Comet photos are hit and miss with the majority being a miss unless you are using a telescope and can also track the stars/sky often taking several pics and then stacking them together to increase the brightness and detail. In addition, post processing any night sky object is an art form that I only get lucky on occasion with. From what I've read, the best time for me will be around the 18th of Dec. when it's an early evening object ( currently it's in the northern sky but it's also only a 11th magnitude object which isn't very bright ). Comet Neowise that came in 2020, was also a southern sky object and I was able to capture it... but the shot had everything going against it. It was better for someone more south of me and I've seen good clear shots of it by other photographers. I had a lot of haze in the sky and it was close to the horizon making a good shot for me, nearly impossible with my equipment ( and a skill level at post processing these that I always struggle with ). If I recall correctly, this was one of the brighter comets I've tried taking a pic of and yet... I had to take pics, then post process them just to be able to find it in the sky. Even that didn't result in a good shot in the end although I can see the tail, which is a small win in my book for comet pics.Here is a shot of it zoomed in, cropped down and then resized down... I'm pretty sure the green color in this shot of the comet was a by product of the post processing when I compare my shot with others I've seen. I've attempted to actually remove that green color, but then the tail also disappears even more. I could mask everything but the head of the comet and then remove the color which would save the rest of the tail, but it isn't good enough of a pic for the additional trouble it would take. The original background started out as a muddy yellowish brown, think of a coffee with a little creamer in it. Basically that brownish color is a mix of a high ISO setting and the humidity in the sky reflecting back the sodium street light pollution. I get rid of it by dropping down the middle highlights, shadows, blacks and then playing with the light curves to "stretch" the available good light so the dimmer stuff we want to see shows up.[ATTACH=full]24052[/ATTACH]Comet Lovejoy from 2015... was even tougher to shoot. Again, it was a matter of finding it using the take a pic and then post process it so I could get a good location to point the camera at for the next shots. The only saving feature of that shoot, was that Pleiades was close by so at least I had a cool shot although it was still far from perfect.The post processing on this shot is on the heavy side... ie there is a lot of of it ( for me ). The upside was this was also the first time I got the blue nebula around the Pleiades star cluster to even show up and I've tried many times to capture that before and after this.  You'll find the Pleiades on the far left side and on the far right, is Comet Lovejoy, it's the fuzzy green dot which has no tail to speak of. This time, the green was the actual color of the comet and not a by product of my post processing. [ATTACH=full]24053[/ATTACH]</blockquote>

Verification