Comet C-2001 Q4 (NEAT)
by Paul Harris

It's been a few years so since we have had a fairly bright comet to view so Jim and I quickly planned a trip to the dark desert skies to see if we could take some pictures of it.  We checked the weather and the conditions for the deserts only got worse and worse with cloudy skies and wind.  I did my final check on Friday morning and things had not improved so we decided to go to Tehachapi.  The Tehachapi sky is not as dark as in the desert but the wind forecasts were much more favorable which would give us a much better chance of taking pictures of the comet.

The weather was pretty good to us at Tehachapi and we had 2 clear nights with only the occasional little gust of wind.  The negative was that the skies were not really dark enough to see and photograph the faint tail of comet C-2001 Q4 (Neat).  Below are 2 photos we took of Comet Hale-Bopp which was both brighter and larger then our intended target.

Comet Hale-Bopp From Years Back

        Below are some photos of our weekend.

Our trusty meteorite-mobile
 

Our camping spot in Tehachapi above the little twin lakes.
 

Our telescope setup area

Scope, 2 cameras, webcam and laptop ready to go.

With my bad neck I can not continually view a guide star to keep the telescope tracked for the
photos. I found a wonderful program call GuideDog http://www.barkosoftware.com/GuideDog/
that runs on the computer and uses a webcam to control the scope for automated guiding. 

A nice sunset through the trees

At about 5000 foot elevation it was getting down to about 40 degrees at night.
We've never been cold in these army surplus insulated suits that Jim found for us.

This is the comet C-2001 Q4 (NEAT) that we went to photograph.  The group of stars above the comet is called
the Bee Hive Open Cluster.  The brighter skies did not allow for as much contrast between the background sky
and the comet tail.  I had to do quite a bit of processing on the image to bring out the broad fan shaped tail.

The above photo of M13 is a Globular Cluster and was taken with a 200mm lens with the camera
piggy backed on the telescope as pictured above.  This is how the comet photo was taken also.

It's been years since I have tried to take any photos though the scope.  I had tried once before and tired
to visually guide the scope but my neck would not allow and the results were very disappointing.
Autoguiding with GuideDog will now allow me to practice more astrophotography.

Globular Cluster M4. 

Spiral Galaxy M51.

Clear Skies!  Paul and Jim