October’s Bright Comet

Fortunately, I had planned to spend October 21–22 in Red River Gorge, a wilderness area in eastern Kentucky a two-hour drive from the Creation Museum and a place that I’ve blogged about before. So, on Monday evening, October 21, I took photographs of the comet from Chimney Top, a hoodoo in the gorge, and one of the best places in the gorge where one can see most of the sky (at most locations in the gorge, one can’t see the sky because of the trees).

Comet (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) is the brightest comet in several years, but it is fading rapidly as it departs the sun.

Here I’m sharing one of those photographs. Thanks to Jim Bonser, who did some post-exposure production to make this photograph pop! Jim contributed some of his astrophotos for my book, The Heavens: A Different View, so he is experienced in improving astrophotos such as this. You can clearly see the comet with its long tail on the right and the Milky Way on the left. Venus is the bright star above the horizon slightly to the right of the center. In the lower part of the horizon, there is Pinch-Em Tight Gap in Pinch-Em Tight Ridge. The light below the horizon on the left is a light from a camper half a mile away at Hanson’s Point at the southernmost part of Pinch-Em Tight Ridge visible from Chimney Top. The “star” slightly above the horizon on the far left is a red light on a cell phone tower. I took this photograph with my Nikon D5600 camera with a 14 mm f/2.8 lens. The ISO was 6400, and exposure time was six seconds.

I’ll have more to say about this comet in an article that I am writing.