Sunday Nature Stills – 1/18/2015

Just one photo this week.

This is a photograph I took of comet Lovejoy on Friday night.  It passed within about 43 million miles of Earth earlier this month.  Lovejoy is pretty dim and is very difficult to see by eye even with our minimal light pollution here.  The green/blue halo around the comet is ionized carbon monoxide.

I took this photograph with a normal telephoto lens on my SLR camera.  To minimize star blur during the long exposures, I used a homemade panning tripod mount.  This image is actually three 30 second long exposures stacked on top of each other to produce a 1.5 minute equivalent exposure.

Michael Fuchs 011815