C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) Comet

I made several mistakes Tuesday evening, I'll explain later. Monday night is trash night so I take the wheelie bin down the drive to the lane. Tuesday is when I bring the empty bin back up to the garage. Normally I bring it back up during the day but because I was photographing birds I didn't do it until around 6:30pm. I had been thinking about photographing the comet and I looked to the West and noticed a fair amount of cloud which made me think I should have gotten off my arse the evening before when it was totally clear. I decided to give it a go at photographing it as it's one of those once in lifetime sights that depending on what you read may not happen again for 80,000 years or over a billion years. I'd been using the Z9 and 400 f/2.8 TC during the day so put that in the back of the car along with the heavy tripod. That was mistake #1 which I'll get to later. It was a little chilly so I grabbed my hoodie thinking that would be warm enough, that was mistake #2, I was freezing my rocks off. I forgot to take gloves even knowing that there was a freeze alert for the county, mistake #3. As I wanted an uninterrupted view of the Western horizon I drove 1/2 mile up the lane to a slight ridge in the fields. That was not right as the field hadn't been harvested and the horizon was obscured by 7ft high  corn stalks. Another couple of hundred yards and I got the view I wanted though. As the Western sky still had intermittent bands of clouds I set the tripod up and photographed the moon in the Eastern sky which was still clear. The result wasn't as sharp as I would like but I know the reason why, heat distortion. I should have taken off the big lens hood as the camera and lens had been on the front seat getting warm, taking it outside there's a big temperature difference between the cold outside air and the air inside the big lens hood, mistake #4. 

There was a gap in the bands of cloud to the West so I started searching for the comet using my iPhone Stellarium app. You just point the phone in the direction of the astronomical object youre looking for and you get an augmented reality view on the screen of the objects along with their names. Perfect, though the gloves would have been nice. Venus was nice and bright as a reference and the comet was about a 1/3rd of the way long in a straight line to Arcturus. You just point the camera around and it even shows a ghost  image of the constellations. 

I waited for a break in the clouds and sure enough you could see it with the naked eye though 8x42 binoculars made it much better. I set up the tripod, camera and lens in the opposite direction to the moon and tried to find the comet in the viewfinder. The moon was dead easy, great big bright round thingy in the dark sky. Trying to find a comet through the viewfinder certainly wasn't. The Z9 and Z8 have a setting for finding stars but I couldnt remember where the hell it was in the extensive menu structure, mistake #5. Trying to navigate through the menus with cold hands in the dark was frustrating, I should have had it all figured out beforehand, mistake #6. Eventually I found it in the Shooting/Display menu, it's d10 Starlight View. Turning that on allowed me to see the bright stars and when I switched to manual focus I was able to bring the stars into sharp focus, mistake #6 was finding which of the friggin dials on the lens is the manual focus compounded by cold hands (see mistake #3). My settings for the image were Manual Mode, 10s Self timer, Manual Focus, Manual ISO 1600, 1 sec and f/2.8 at 400mm.

I'm reasonably pleased with it and I hope it's clear tonight because mistake #1 was that the 400mm was too long, I should have used the 70-200mm f/2.8 as I could have included the horizon in the image. I'd like to do much more astro photography but as both my avid readers know, I'm falling asleep by 9pm and when I'm up and about by 5am I'm too busy feeding the hungry critters to go out in the cold and stand around in the dark. Oh well.