The much heralded Comet SWAN (aka C/2020 F8) makes it appearance in my morning dawn sky at my northern latitude after putting on a show in the southern skies. However, it doesn’t look or photograph like much as it is low and lost in the early dawn twilight. It is the small fuzzy green spot left of centre. It will climb higher but dawn is also coming on sooner as we approach summer solstice. So this comet will never be well-placed for northern latitude observers. This is a stack of 4 x 30-second exposures at ISO 400 with the William Optics RedCat 51mm f/5 astrograph and Canon EOS Ra, giving a focal length of 250mm and a field 8° by 5°. The comet was in Triangulum at this time, but moving northward.
The waxing 3-day-old Moon in twilight with Earthshine on the dark side of the Moon. Note the “Baily’s Beads” of bright peaks catching the morning sunlight around the lunar south pole. This is an HDR blend of 5 exposures in Camera Raw, to bring out the faint Earthshine while retaining detail in the bright sunlit crescent. Taken April 25, 2020 with the 130mm Astro-Physics refractor at f/6 and Canon EOS Ra camera at ISO 100.
A train of Starlinks on April 18, 2020, from the 5 batch launched a month earlier on March 18, 2020, in procession across the south in the darkening twilight, from home in Alberta. This is one frame from 100 shot this evening as they appeared in a long train over more than an hour. Many were magnitude +1. However, two nights later most appeared 2 t 3 magnitudes fainter and were hard to photograph and, except for a few, were not easy to pick out to the naked eye. An attempt to record a time-lapse on April 20 didn’t record many. This is a single 4-second exposure at f/2.2 with the 14mm Sigma Art lens and Nikon D750 at ISO 800.
