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Come join the friendliest, most engaging and inclusive astronomy forum geared for beginners and advanced telescope users, astrophotography devotees, plus check out our "Astro" goods vendors.
As I'm sure everyone is aware, Comet NEOWISE has passed into the evening sky now and survived its trip near the Sun. I haven't made it out to a dark sky location with the scope yet because our daytime temps have been hovering around 115°(46°c) and even at sunset it's still around 105°(40.5°c) so setting up all the gear will be brutal. I did decide to see if I could capture it with a simple DSLR/tripod rig from my home balcony and even though I couldn't make it out naked eye, it did show up on the camera. I wish now I had let the camera shoot longer, at least another 30 minutes, but I really didn't think I had captured anything until I loaded the files on the computer.
You might also notice a fairly smooth transition from day to night, well I was using an old device that I bought around 2010 called the Little Bramper. It's a bulb ramping device that steadily adjust your shutter speeds and compensates for ISO changes. The only limitation I see so far is that its shortest exposure is 34ms. That means that even at ISO50, f2.8 the sun would completely blow out the images. I had to wait until the sun set behind the mountains to begin the day to night timelapse. This timelapse started at ISO50, 34ms and ended at ISO400, 1.5 seconds. Pretty smooth transitions! Let me know what you think.
