Not only have there been lots of colorful lights in our night skies, there’s also been a comet. Or so I’m told. It’s not the kind of comet that shines brightly in the sky, it’s more reticent than that. Less showy.
Of course that makes it all the more alluring for night photographers, professional and armature alike. I went out on two successive nights to try to find the comet.
The first night neighbors and I met on a dirt road outside of town with an unrestricted view to the west. It should have been perfect. But though we stood out there, eyes turned toward the sky, scanning back and forth for over an hour we didn’t see it. We did however figure out we needed a heavier coat, hat and gloves if we were ever to do this again.
Oh, it was there all right — plenty of people posted images from that night. But we didn’t see it. Perhaps it wasn’t dark enough where we stood. Perhaps those clouds hanging low on the horizon obscured our view. Perhaps the nearly full moon rising behind us as the sun set was to blame.
Or maybe it was all of that combined. Regardless, we headed home empty handed. And very cold.
The next evening I met a fellow Milky Way student out at my favorite park, where we planned to show her daughter the birds that come down to eat out of people’s hands, and then head to a dark place along the lake to look for the comet.
Before we even headed out to look for the birds we got to see other flying things.
I rarely head out to feed the birds in late evening, but we tried. She did get a few birds to come down from their sleepy roosts to get a bedtime snack, but not many.
We didn’t see many birds that evening, but we did see other things flying.
Though at first we weren’t quite sure what it was.
Meanwhile, my friend’s daughter’s new best friend was a chipmunk who stuffed himself with seeds, ran off to deposit them some safe place for later and ran right back to get more seed multiple times. I think he has enough provisions to get him through the winter now.
As we were driving to our chosen comet viewing location we noticed the big orange moon was rising. I made a hard, quick right and we pulled in along a couple dozen other photographers, focused on the beautiful rising moon.
You’ll have to take my word for it. It was bright orange and rising up above the trees, reflecting in the lake. I didn’t have my camera set up for a moon shot, it wasn’t on a tripod. As I was messing with all of that the moment passed, as it does so often in photography.
As the sky turned red and then darkened we hurried to the spot we hoped would be perfect for comet viewing. A beach, deserted, gave us a perfect view of the night sky. But where was that comet?
We had come armed with instructions from other, successful, comet photographers — descriptions of where it was in the sky, how many degrees from this star or that formation. We tried it all, pointing our cameras in all sorts of directions, hoping.
And then my friend’s 22 year old daughter, bored with the old folks and their expensive equipment, raised her phone to the sky, shot one image and said…”It’s right there.”
And bingo. Knowing exactly where to shoot, even though we couldn’t see it, made all the difference. We couldn’t even see it in our images, unless we zoomed way in. So we might have gotten shots of it and not even known, would never have known, without the young women’s gift.
So there you have it. The comet who’s name I can’t pronounce or even spell. The elusive, sneaky, fading comet who will be back to visit in a mere 80,000 years. Or is it 800,000?
I’ll have those camera settings down by then. How about you?
Change Is Hard 