Astrophotographer:

Carter Roberts

 

Comet NEAT was a naked eye object from my house tonight (May 9, 2004). Here is a quick shot with a 135mm lens on my Canon 10D. Given the smaller sensor and a slight cropping of the image makes this roughly like a 300mm lens on 35mm film (20 sec F/4 plus 15 sec F/2.8 at ISO 400).

Comet S-W 3 taken evening of 5/7/2006: as it passed the Ring nebula. The ring is that pale blue object to the upper right of the comet. The bright stars at top and bottom are the two stars of the parallelogram in Lyra farthest from Vega. I deliberately took this one when it looked like a Boeing object would pass by. This image was taken with the Sky 90 with field flattener, 30 sec at ISO 400. I didn't have a good finder chart and with the haze plus moonlight the comet was not noticeable visually. It must have been there but just looked like a star with the eyepieces I tried.