There's currently a massive ball of ice flying past our planet: a comet known as C/2022 E3 (ZTF). On the night of January 28th, I took advantage of clear skies and headed away from Vancouver's city lights to photograph this celestial visitor! While the comet is currently visible high in the north all night, I set my alarm for 2:00am, and spent several hours in the early morning imaging. This was when the moon was below the horizon, making the skies darker and the comet more visible. It was a chilly -5°C (23°F) outside and even colder with a very strong wind chill, but seeing the turquoise glow of the comet show up on my camera screen brought a big smile to my face!
Despite the fact that this comet is likely to be the brightest of 2023, it admittedly doesn't look like much to the naked eye. From a dark location, it appears as a faint star with a bit of a glow around it. A telescope or binoculars will reveal a bit more detail, but long exposure photographs are required to uncover the comet in all of its glory, including two tails: the ion tail (straight and blue-ish), and the dust tail (fan-shaped and warmer in colour). Also visible in this image is the bright turquoise atmosphere of the comet, known as the coma.
This final image integrates about 70 minutes of stacked exposure time (75 second subframes), shot at 260mm using a star tracker. Due to high winds shaking the trees as I was photographing the comet, I had to shoot a corresponding foreground of trees on a subsequent outing to complete this final image.
No two comets are the same, and with a 50,033 year orbit around the sun, this one won't be visiting us in the inner solar system again anytime soon! Despite traveling past our planet at nearly 40 kilometers per second, its distance from Earth means it appears stationary to the eye. The comet reaches its peak brightness today (February 1st 2023), but is likely to remain visible for a bit longer, and photographable for some time!