Pictures of Comet Swan, October 26, 2006

ian.kluft.com / pics / 20061026-cometswan /

Sean Lynch and I went to try and see if mere mortals could get pictures of Comet Swan. Obviously neither of us is an astronomer - otherwise this might have been done with a telescope instead of an SLR camera. But between us we had enough information to get some shots of it. Sean said he wanted to get a picture and printed out a sky chart. I had the binoculars, a digital SLR camera and a tripod. At a site in the hills a little ways away from the city lights, Sean was able to find it with binoculars.

Here are the pictures we got, ranging from 5-30 second exposures. Note that even with a 5 second exposure some of Earth's rotation is visible in the photos. It's more pronounced with the 30-second exposures.

The longer exposures also collect more of the city lights. We were only about 5 minutes up into the hills on the crest of Calaveras Blvd east of Milpitas, so by no means away from the Bay Area lights.

In these pictures, the green object is the comet.

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