Daily Archives: 21 January 2007

After the huge response I had to the photo I took on Friday night I decided to go out to the same spot again on Saturday night. Fellow ODP members, Bluepixel and squiggles joined me and we spent a pleasant few hours sitting on the rocks and snapping shots of the moon and comet. Unfortunately the wind was pumping, as it often does in this part of the world, and I almost had my tripod and camera blown off the rocks. This made night photography difficult as exposures of several seconds are needed and my tripod doesn’t provide enough stability in such wind. Still, I managed to get another nice shot of the comet and tail, shortly before it set.

On Friday evening I went out to the lookout point beyond the Steenbras River mouth to do some comet spotting. McNaught put on a great show and the weather was quite pleasant with a stiff breeze that moved some small clouds across the sky providing added interest to photographs.

As the comet gradually set the tail spread out over a vast expanse of the sky and I took this photo with a 50mm lens, after the comet itself had set behind a low bank of cloud on the horison.

This photograph was featured on the home page of SpaceWeather.com on the following day.