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Howard Cohen
Gainesville, FL, United States
07/19/2020
09:26 pm

Equipment Details:

Canon EOS 5D II with Canon 50 mm, f/1.8 lens at f/2.0. Exposure 15s at ISO 400. iOptron Skytracker Mount.

Post-processing Details:

Processed with Corel Paintshop Pro. Final image slightly trimmed from original.

Image Details:

Comet Neowise C/2020 F3 shares the sky with Florida thunderstorms.

Florida is the lightning capital of the USA. Therefore, typical summer evening Florida skies are often murky with high humidity and thunderstorms. This often made seeing this comet difficult from this southern state.

Still, on the evening of 2020 July 19 Comet Neowise was fortunately observed sharing a summer evening sky above a suburban landscape outside Gainesville, Florida. Photo taken about 55 minutes after sunset. Meanwhile, thunderstorms gathered toward the northern and western horizons.

The comet was also dimly visible to the naked eye and its tail could be seen stretching across the five-degree field of a 12x binocular. Estimated nuclear magnitude was +3.6, or more than four times fainter than the North Star.