10/19/2024
I pulled out my 30 year old Canon 80-200 zoom and took some shots of Comet C_2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS). It's fading and is hard to spot with bare eyes in the urban sky glow after sunset but it was easily visible in photos. I had to take short exposures of 2 seconds to keep the stars from trailing because of earth's rotation. Good thing it's a fast zoom that lets in lots of light.
This photo has 7 trails from Elon's StarLink satellites. Full disclosure, this is two frames combined, one had 4 trails, the other had three, but there were taken less than 30 seconds apart. This is why astronomers are unhappy with the thousands of satellites he's launched. He has made new ones darker so they aren't so bright but they are still visible. You can see the trails aren't all the same brightness.
The comet will continue to fade s it heads back to the Oort cloud, not to come this way again for another 80,000 years.
