City Comet

In the morning of 2020 July 10, I woke up early to photograph Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. Yet, the main reason was the possibility of seeing comet Neowise (C/2020 F3) as it might attain visibility with unaided eyes after perihelion passage 2 weeks earlier. I fact I had already caught the comet on July 6th as it rose in the northeast, but it did not look extraordinary in bright twilight.

This morning was different. As soon as I got on the rooftop and turned northeast, there it was, hanging over the hills as a yellowish light fan. That was the moment I said “Yes, now we have a bright comet, at last”. Neowise was as bright as magnitude +1 and had a 5-degree long dust tail shooting straight up. It was bright enough to see from a city, as long as you are awake in the early morning for this. And the show was only beginning.

This panorama is a representation of my first good look at NEOWISE rising over Bursa at dawn, together with Venus shining right in the center of Hyades. The second image is a closer look at the comet in the brightening twilight.