This might be the best shot of Comet NEOWISE to date

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This might be the best shot of Comet NEOWISE to date

Comet NEOWISE streaks over the Marin County hills near Mount Tamalpais on Wednesday, July 15, shortly after sunset. Photo by Palo Alto robotics engineer Dheera Venkatraman, whose work can be seen on Instagram.

 

Catching a glimpse of Comet NEOWISE as it streaks across the evening sky this July can be difficult in the Bay Area.

 

Fog and light pollution are not the friends of stargazers — or astrophotographers.

 

So Dheera Venkatraman, a Palo Alto robotics/computer engineer with a keen interest in photography, traveled to the Marin County high country Wednesday evening seeking a good place from

 

which to shoot the shooting star above the marine layer and city lights.

 

He found one near Mount Tamalpais, and the result was jaw-droppingly spectacular.

 

“I didn't have to hike very far, but I did end up walking along roads for a long time before finding a good vantage point," says Venkatraman in an email. “The extent and height of the fog changes

 

every day, so you can't always rely on the same location being good from one day to another — you kind of just have to play it by ear.”

 

 

Venkatraman used an 85mm lens for the long-exposure capture. He says astrophotography requires combining knowledge of astronomy with optics and signal processing to extract the extremely

 

faint signals in the sky.

 

“A lot of astronomical objects are actually much bigger than people think they are — for example Andromeda is visually about five times the size of the moon — but they are just too faint to see

 

with the naked eye,” he says. “Likewise, this comet's tail is huge in the sky, but unfortunately the naked eye can only make out a small portion of the tail.”

 

Venkatraman, 36, has a Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has built cameras and imaging devices.

 

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