From the Diary of an Image Hunter • hunting for Neowise

The delicate balance… to invest your time vs to feel you've lost it!

In the last week, I slept four hours on three different afternoons to
be able to go hunting for Neowise. My son and I thought we had
everything planned for a 4 to 5 h. session of looking up that night.

From azimuthal coordinates, trajectories, and relative position on
given dates to clean and loaded gear, field laptop, food & drinks…
even fully updated weather reports, we thought we had everything
planned. Really?

This central Europe geography and micro climate allow the success-
full growing of some great white wines but all micro climates come
with price: local weather conditions that are not included in the na-
tional forecasts.

The first night had great skies, Ursa Major — read the Great Bear —
was bright and clear and Neowise was expected right underneath.
The fog started to invade the fields and I didn't feel good about that. 
My son was trying in vain to reassure me but he did not consider the 
rotation of the planet in his equation.

Too soon if you ask me, the Great bear was behind a foggy curtain
and the crazy sharp picture we had of it showed a comet that was
looking like a smudgy blur.

The second attempt, another spot was found but the results were
about the same. The third try, last night, we went to the highest hill
— where wine is grown at the highest altitude in Europe at 564 m
or 1850 feet — thinking that fog would be of no inconvenience up
there… and we were right.

Except that no body said anything about very high altitude splendid
cirrus cloud formations that yielded about the same result as the fog.

We shall try again when it comes back in about 6 766 years.