Comet NEOWISE at 85mm

The dark skies of the Eastern Sierra are generally excellent for night photography and astrophotography from Topaz Lake to Mammoth Lakes, and from Big Pine to Olancha.

To preserve some bright comet and dark landscape detail while reducing noise, I used 7 exposures combined in Sequator star-stacking software, with HDR processing switched on.

C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) was a newly-dicovered comet that became naked-eye visible last year, the brightest comet seen from the Northern Hemisphere since Hale-Bopp in 1997. It was so bright, under dark skies on moonless nights it was difficult to photograph the brigght coma and the surrounding landscape in the same scene. The blue ion tail not only goes out of the frame in this 85mm composition, it also did so in my much wider 24mm ones.