Home»Creative Subjects»The Sky»Comet NEOWISE and MilkyWay

On July 23, 2020, the NEOWISE Comet came as close to Earth as it was going to get, so my son and I took a few hour trip to a spot where there was very little light pollution. We used light pollution maps to find a dark place near Tomah WI, and we parked deep within the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge (with 10 million mosquitos) and took pictures for about 1 ½ hrs. Here’s a few shots of the Comet, a few of the Milky Way, and one with both. Several of the pictures were taken with a fisheye lens (that takes a very-very wide angle photo, and in one of the pictures of the Milk Way, I was looking up at about a 45 degree angle to see the Milky Way, and you can ALSO see the Comet in the upper left corner, which was actually close to the horizon behind me (the fisheye lens gets all of that, from the view in front of me, on top of me, and behind me).

You might notice that the stars are not perfectly round, this is because the shutter was open for 3 to 30 seconds and the light from the star blurred as the Earth rotated, and the wide angle lenses were also a factor.
These are best viewed on a PC with a monitor. If viewing on your phone, the darker the room the better. These were taken between 10pm & 11 pm.