Processed using DXO Pure Raw initially and the rest in Adobe Photoshop with treatments that included light noise & color noise treatments and some slight color correction to the sky. Beyond all that, there was some cropping involved to get closer upon the comet. Ideally, I would love to have photographed the comet with some ground objects but that palm tree in the lower right-hand corner was as good as it was going to get.

This shot was part of a series of photos I took Friday night 12/17/2021 between 6:30 PM and 7:00 PM of the Southwestern sky from my backyard in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona at the Western edge of Cave Creek. To be honest, I really didn't expect to be able capture the comet as the full moon was very bright and I couldn't see the comet with binoculars. This shot was made possible simply as a result of taking a lot of experimental photos between Venus and the ground and then examining them in a computer afterwards. The lens I used wasn't the best for the job (night photography). The Nikon D3s camera is only a 12-megapixel camera but its pixels are big and let in lots of light making it great for night shoots.

On another note: I have no clue what that lit-up object is going into the palm tree. I know that the camera was still and there was no shaking or motion artifact in the shot. If anything, I'm discovering that weird things managed to get into many of my shots when doing this kind of photography with a powerful long lens in the dark. Jet contrails look really cool under these dark conditions. In every case, I never actually see this stuff with my naked eye during the shoot as the objects are really super far away and I only see them after the fact on the computer.