This week’s entries featured a plethora of images of the arrival Comet NEOWISE (C/2020 F3) in our skies.
With a detailed capture of NEOWISE’s dust and ion tails against the starry background, the winner of the week of July 24, 2020 is Jeff Beairsto.
Beairsto captured this heavenly picture of Comet NEOWISE July 15 at 23:46 AST from Oromocto Lake in the “reasonably dark skies” of southwest New Brunswick. He used a Nikon D600 mounted on his Starfield 500mm f/5.5 scope with a 1x field flattener (also Starfield). He used a CG-5 mount to track it, although it was unguided. The exposure time was 100 seconds at ISO 1600.
Beairsto also said the telescope was a 50th birthday present.
The runner up this week is Oleg Bouevitch with his beautiful image on Mars. As one of the judges pointed out, “I really like the way the polar ice cap on Mars is brought out in the image. And the orangey colour / shade on the rest of the planet is done well.”
This photo was taken on July 10 in Nepean, Ontario. The image was captured using a ZWO ASI290MM camera through a 14” SCT telescope at f/22 on a Losmandy G11 mount. The image is composed of two-minute videos using each of the red, green and blue filters. It was processed using AutoStakkert!, Registax, Photoshop and Topaz.
