I tried to see the green comet and completely failed. It took more planning and equipment than he expected.

• I tried to see the famous green comet in the night skies, far from the city, this past weekend.

• It was much more difficult than I expected, even with the advice of a professional, because I did not plan well in advance.

• The moon eclipsed most of the stars and I couldn’t locate the faint comet, even with binoculars.

Only a small fraction of the human population will see the green comet howling past Earth this month. I tried to become one of them, but it was much more difficult than I expected.

I’ve heard (and written) a lot of hype about this comet, called C/2022 E3 (ZTF), or ZTF Comet for short. The ball of frozen gas and dust returned for the first time since the Ice Age 50,000 years ago.

I was already going camping at Pinnacles National Park last weekend, and thought I’d try to spot the rare celestial visitor myself.

Pinnacles is not an official sanctuary from the dark sky, but it is several hours from the big cities of San Jose and San Francisco, and you can usually see plenty of stars between its volcanic cliffs.

I thought my chances were pretty good. Maybe that was my first mistake.

I had never tried to locate a particular object in the night sky before, so I contacted Dan Bartlett, an astrophotographer living in California, for advice. He has been taking beautiful photos of the comet, like this one:

He knew he wouldn’t see anything so clear. She has a telescope set up in the mountains to get those views. But I wanted to get as close as I could without spending a ton of money.

“It will be quite large, and about a quarter of the field of your binoculars,” Bartlett told me in an email.

If that was the case, I thought I couldn’t miss it.

He said binoculars were essential so I stopped at REI to buy a pair. Following his advice and some astronomy blogs I read online, I chose a $120 pair labeled 8 x 42: the first number indicates its magnifying power, and the second measures the diameter of the objective lenses in millimeters.

Unfortunately, that would not be enough to detect the comet. I was hoping to at least catch a grainy green glow in the night sky, but utterly failed.

the story continues

Finding faint objects in the sky is harder than you thought. It is not something to do at the last minute, with little planning and no experience.

2 things I did right: I dressed for the weather and downloaded a constellation app

At least I can congratulate myself on staying warm. The forecast showed it would drop as low as 40 degrees Fahrenheit at Pinnacles, and I’m cold, so I packed lots of layers and a warm hat, socks, and scarf.

I also bought foot warmers and a rechargeable hand warmer that I got for Christmas.

I also foresaw another problem that might have sent me to my tent early: I have no experience locating any celestial objects other than the moon and the Big Dipper. You would need to find Mars and the Capella star to identify the correct area to look for the comet.

Bartlett said that Sky Safari was “the best mobile phone app out there, hands down”. So I paid $4.99 to download it. The app used GPS to tag constellations, planets, and stars as I moved my phone’s camera across the sky.

It helped me find Mars quickly – the orange glow was a dead giveaway, but it would have taken me longer to scan the sky on my own. I probably wouldn’t have been able to watch Capella without Sky Safari.

Mistake No. 1: Picking a night when the moon would be bright

I thought I would have to wake up before dawn to avoid the moon, but it turned out that the moon would be in the sky through Friday night until almost 7 a.m. So I would be able to see the comet at a reasonable hour, Bartlett told me. .

That sounded like great news to me, as I’m not a morning person and I especially dislike waking up before the sun. But it would have been better to get up early for a moonless sunrise.

“The moon will be extremely bright and interfere. There is no way around this,” Bartlett said. “It’s like you decided to view the comet from a medium-sized city.”

He was more right than I realized.

Forget the comet: there weren’t even that many stars visible. It was almost as if he had never left the city. Even when I kept the moon on my back and gave my eyes 15 minutes to adjust, I didn’t see much. Every time I looked at the moon, my eyes would reset and I had to let them adjust again.

The fine wisps of clouds floating in the sky probably made it even worse.

Mistake No. 2: Not testing before losing internet

The ZTF comet was supposed to be 5 degrees north of the star Capella, which you can find by first identifying Mars. Locating Capella and looking north was easy. But what does 5 degrees mean?

I realized too late that I did not remember and had not written it down. It had no service at Pinnacles so I couldn’t google it. He knew the general area where the comet was supposed to be, but not how big or small that area was. So I scanned far and wide around Capella, hoping to hit the jackpot.

I saw many satellites and planes, but no comet.

One of the people who camped with me mentioned that he had heard that the comet would be between Ursa Minor and Ursa Major. That was a huge space, and I couldn’t verify it without the Internet, but it matched what Bartlett had told me.

That helped me identify what the problem might have been: the space between the Big Dipper and Capella passed through a large halo of light that encircled the moon. I couldn’t see any stars in that bright ring.

As the night wore on, I began to lose hope. At one point, my campmates pointed out a plane speeding past the moon, leaving a trail of condensation in its wake. They joked that it was the comet.

I took a photo so I would have at least something to show for my efforts. Don’t let that green dot in the photo get you excited, it’s just a glitch in my phone’s camera.

Mistake #3: Thinking I could take photos with my phone through my binoculars

Even without a comet, I enjoyed how much clearer and better resolved the stars appeared through my binoculars. I wanted to share the view, and had seen reviews of the binoculars online where people took photos by holding their phone camera close to the lens.

I tried to do the same, but all the images came out like this:

The stars did not appear at all. Taking photos directly of the sky, without binoculars, gave slightly better results:

If I had seen the green comet, I would not have been able to capture it on my iPhone X.

The next morning, in bright sunlight, I tried the technique again with a lighter subject: trees on a hillside. It still didn’t work.

After completely failing my attempt at amateur astronomy, I have even more respect for planning, calculation, and the patience that goes into it.

Who knows, maybe I looked directly at the green comet and didn’t recognize it because it was too faint. But the next time I go looking for celestial objects, I will prepare much more. If I can, I’ll bring someone who knows what he does.

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