It’s the kind of excuse teachers have heard many times from young children whose homework was reportedly eaten by the family pet. Our son’s childhood keyboard teacher, Andrea, once told her own music teacher that her cow had eaten her music. Andrea did, in fact, have a pet cow that enjoyed listening to Andrea practicing her Bach on the piano in the barn. She says that her teacher replied, “If it were anyone but you, I wouldn’t believe that story.”
In this instance, my effort to capture Comet Leonard two nights ago met with an obstacle. With the comet close to the horizon in the evening sky, the line of sight from my 150mm observatory astrograph to the position of comet, passed through the branches of an oak tree in my backyard. Alas!
Below are my image of the comet that evening and another rendering of the same frame but cropped to emphasize the comet. You can see the cometary head (the coma) and just a hint of its tail beginning as a halo around the coma.
Time to prune the tree.
If the obstruction were higher up the tree, that might be a viable idea. As it is, the comet is so low in the western horizon that I would have to cut the tree down completely. No comet is worth that sacrifice. It makes more sense to travel to a dark site to photograph it. Alas, that kind of travel is not in the cards for us just yet.