Tue, 07/14/2020 - 10:15am

Comet Neowise, over Clary Hill in Union. (Photo courtesy Kyle Santheson)

Kyle Santheson captured Comet Neowise with his camera July 12, 90 minutes after sunset, at 9:53 p.m.

This shot was taken from atop Clary Hill in Union looking northwest towards Washington.

He shot the photo at ISO 1600, f4, and with an 8-second exposure, using a Canon 5D MK IV with a Tameron 70-200 G2 lens.

The namesake of Neowise, according to NASA, follows: “NASA's WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) spacecraft was an infrared-wavelength astronomical space telescope active from December 2009 to February 2011. In September 2013 the spacecraft was assigned a new mission as NEOWISE to help find near-Earth asteroids and comets.”

About Comet Neowise, from Wickipedia:

C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE), or Comet NEOWISE, is a retrograde comet with a near-parabolic orbit discovered on March 27, 2020, by astronomers using the NEOWISE space telescope. At that time, it was a 10th-magnitude comet, located 2 AU (300 million km; 190 million mi) away from the Sun and 1.7 AU (250 million km; 160 million mi) away from Earth.^[3]

By July 2020, it was bright enough to be visible to the naked eye. Under dark skies, it can be clearly seen with the naked eye^[4] and is expected to remain visible to the naked eye throughout most of July 2020.^[3]

For observers in the northern hemisphere, in the morning, the comet appears low above the north-eastern horizon, below Capella. In the evening, the comet can be seen in the north-western sky. In the second half of July 2020, Comet NEOWISE will appear to pass through the constellation of Ursa Major, below the asterism of the Big Dipper (The Plough).^[5]