Milky Way & Comet Panstarrs

Note that this is a 3 a.m. event on Sunday morning!

We are officially opening the Milky Way season, with the galaxy being a nice, shallow arch along the eastern horizon early in the morning. This enables us to make a nice panorama with normally wide lenses, 20mm full frame is sufficient, but wider lets you do this with less images.

In addition, Comet C/2025 R3 (PANSTARRS) is revisiting us and is already about a magnitude of 6 (the cross in the above image). It will get as bright as 2, but only visible in the southern hemisphere. So, in addition to the super wide panorama lens, also bring the longest lens you got for the comet. And maybe you can catch the setting moon in the west, too. We will have about an hour of darkness for the comet.

It would be neat to make a panorama as shown above and then compose a larger version of the comet into it where it actually was!

We can talk about post processing techniques during the event. Weather forecast has us at 15% clouds at the event time, watch the comments for updates.

As always, be on-time, check in with the organizer and no guests.