A new comet -- Tsuchinshan-ATLAS -- graced our sky in early October this year! In the past, I have managed to somewhat successfully photograph Comet McNaught, Comet Holmes, and Comet NEOWISE (twice!), so I was eager to try again with this new comet.

On the night when it was supposed to be the brightest, I went out but all I saw was a beautiful sunset and cloudy skies. It took five long days for the sky to clear up again. Once it did, Finna agreed to come out with me to search for the comet. We set up on a very convenient hill up by the water tower in Elora.

This was Finna's first sky-observing trip that she could remember, so I brought my binoculars out. (She was with me when I photographed Comet NEOWISE for the second time, but she doesn't remember.)

As the sky grew dark, we started searching for the comet. It didn't take us very long. The "Night Sight" setting on my phone is very useful for comet hunting - I can just take a photo of the region of the sky where I think the comet is, and the long exposure of the phone camera makes it pop right out of the sky.

Once I knew where the comet was, I set up the binoculars to point right at it, and Finna got her first glimpse of the comet nucleus through them. Once Finna knew what she was looking for, and which direction it was, she could suddenly see the comet with her bare eyes. I set up my camera and started taking photos.

While I was taking photos, Finna took turns appreciating the comet with her eyes, then through the binoculars, and looking at the images I was capturing on my camera. For a while, we pointed the binoculars at Saturn, and Finna was excited that she was able to see the rings!

To make this final image, I combined 16 photos that I took into one using DeepSkyStacker and Photoshop. This helped me get rid of some of the airplane contrails that were drifting through the sky and were almost as bright as the comet itself.

Technical Details: This photo is a combination of 16 images taken with my Canon 5D Mark II + EF 17-40L at 40mm, ISO 1600, f/4 for 5 seconds each, giving a total exposure time of 1 minute and 20 seconds.