Anybody catch Leonard yet?

[pakarinen]

I've been clouded out for the last 6-7 days. :Boo:

[KathyNS]

I have been mostly clouded out, and now it is dropping lower in the east, so it will soon be daylight before it clears the trees. I did catch it a month ago. At that point, it was too dim for binoculars.

14x 60s L only

[helicon]

I haven't seen it yet but there was a great picture somebody shared on Facebook of Leonard passing within a few arc minutes of M3 the globular cluster.

Edit: Here's the pic courtesy of Sky &Telescope...

[Chich]

Right there with you. We've had little but drab grey skies.

[pakarinen]

Cloudy again this morning and the forecast is for more muck the next several days. I think I’m going to miss this one.

[helicon]

Foggy here. I was getting ready to sweep it up this morning about 5 degrees from Arcturus with the 25x100's. No dice.

[kt4hx]

I happened to wake up at about 0600 on Monday morning and though the sky was pretty poor here at home, I just caught a very fleeting glimpse of it in the 10x50s through high thins.

[Makuser]

Cloudy skies and 97% humidity here so no chance of a view. However, thank you Kathy for your nice image of Comet Leonard from last month and also to you Michael for the excellent capture provided by S&T magazine.

[Michael131313]

I was able to catch it at 5:30 Dec. 6. The skies were not very good and it was low on the horizon -about 28*. Used Arcturus to set my homemade setting circle and Stellarium to get az-alt. Faint fuzzy oblong, fairly long. Not at all what I expected. Now I know what Messier was looking for. It looked very much like an elongated globular cluster. I checked out M3 at the same time. Much brighter and well defined.
Best
Michael

[pakarinen]

It's supposed to finally clear up tonight. Probably the last chance to catch Leonard, but it's going to be awfully low and close to sunrise.

[Shelby]

Who all got to see comet C/2021 A1 (Leonard)? I was going to look at it, but at my home in Louisiana, it has been cloudy the whole time. I missed this comet because of the clouds. If you saw it, was there anything special about it, what did I miss?

[messier 111]

the comet will be at 5 degrees from venus the 17th, maybe your last chance?

[starfield]

Clouds, clouds, clouds. No luck here.

[pakarinen]

Clouds, clouds, clouds. No luck here.

Same.

[XCalRocketMan]

Didn't see it visually, but finally managed an image back on Dec 5th and only just got the time to process it.

20x60sec RGB; WO-GT102 at f/5.6; ASI2600mm

[Shelby]

That looks pretty nice. What did you use to get that image, just curious? It looks like the comet is green in color like some other comets I have seen in the past. It doesn't look like clouds are going to let up for me here anytime soon, so I probably won't see it personally.

[helicon]

Clouds, clouds, clouds. No luck here.

Me too. Clouds/rain.

[kt4hx]

Just FYI, I merged the two respective threads from users pakarinen and Shelby, which basically asked the same question and received similar responses. Didn't see the need to run two separate threads in two forums for this topic. Unfortunately it doesn't seem many got the opportunity to see Comet Leonard up to this point.

[XCalRocketMan]

That looks pretty nice. What did you use to get that image, just curious? It looks like the comet is green in color like some other comets I have seen in the past. It doesn't look like clouds are going to let up for me here anytime soon, so I probably won't see it personally.

I did post the details under the picture, (used my William Optics GT102 APO with 0.8x FR and ASI2600mm camera. 20 subs of each color (RGB). Processed in APP and PI.)

Post processing took awhile because of some issues with using APCC Horizons on my AP1100 mount. Although I was able to track the comet head 'almost' perfectly, for some reason the comet drifted in DEC a little bit. So I ended up with stars trailing one way and the comet another. After multiple attempts to get a comet-only and stars-only image I just settled on the trailed version I posted here.

Even when the clouds clear I will not be able to capture anymore images at my home since my tree line limits views to >25 degrees. I could try at my church's location using my portable mount but I doubt I'll have the time with the holidays coming up.

Many comets glow green because of the excitation of their CN and C2 molecules. There is a good discussion at https://slate.com/technology/2010/06/ac ... green.html.