No Northern Lights here with all the clouds of the last week.

Full Pixel 7 image
1/5s f/1.9 ISO:23084

But on 14 October it brightened up just before sunset so I went out to see if the comet (Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) was visible. The location in the sky to the west is obscured from the house by the trees along the road. So I went up into the field to the north of the farmhouse where the view was clear. The comet was visible to the naked eye as a long streak, even before it was completely dark.

I hadn’t take my camera and tripod as I’d only gone speculatively and  hadn’t expected to see anything. But I did have my mobile phone and took a couple of photos.

Cropped image

 I wasn’t sure I’d captured anything until I returned to the house to get my camera. But by then the comet would have disappeared behind the clouds so I didn’t return.

The forecast isn’t good for the rest of the week, so I very lucky.

An update

Full Pixel 7 image – comet just left of centre

The sky was hazy on 17 Oct so I decided to have another go at photographing the comet. I couldn’t see it, but my phone did capture it.

This time I’d taken my camera and tripod. My telephoto lens doesn’t have a wide aperture so I needed 4s/6.3 at ISO:6400 exposures and then stacked five images to get a longer effective exposure time. This is taken looking through the haze, so still not a very clear comet tail. The blurred stars due to the planet movement during the 4s exposure.