A Tale of two Tails - Celestial Visitor C/2020 F3 NEOWISE

            Greetings human creatures, of the planet you call "Earth". I have come a long way to adorn your skies, to make you gaze up into the starry firmament to admire my mysterious nature.
You have given me the strange name "NEOWISE", because a few months ago a space telescope in orbit around Earth, first spotted me as I was approaching your planet, hundreds of millions of miles away. But this is not where I come from. My cradle is located far beyond the orbits of the furthest planets and asteroids, where billions of small, icy bodies, relics of the solar system's formation, move lazily around the Sun. Although the Sun from that far is just a speck of light, its gravitational attraction keeps these frozen bodies in orbit. 
Thousands of years ago, perhaps after a tiny nudge from a passing star that slightly deflected my orbit, I started ever so slowly my plunge towards the Sun. I have silently travelled the coldness of space until I first crossed the orbits of the gas giants and then entered the inner solar system, heading towards the central star. 
The Sun's heat slowly but steadily warmed my frozen surface and finally my true nature was revealed: an enormous mass of ice, mixed with rocks and dust. As the icy crust that covers my nucleus began to sublimate, gases and dust particles started to form an atmosphere around my solid nucleus. The steady flow of the solar wind pushes the dust and gas into two magnificent tails: the curved, yellowish dust tail and the more straight, blue ion tail, extending for millions of miles into space, opposite the direction of the Sun. And now you can see me in the night sky not as a dark, frozen mass but as a dazzling comet, changing position in front of the distant stars from night to night.
It will not be long before I disappear from the night sky, to return to the depths of space. In the coming weeks I will become increasingly dimmer and harder to spot and my tails will diminish. I will return, but it will not be until thousands of years in the future. 
People used to fear comets: for eons, comets were considered sinister omens, heralding the death of kings, and announcing the start of wars and disaster. It took the genius of giants like Isaac Newton and Halley to realize that comets, are simply celestial bodies travelling in elongated orbits around the Sun.
I apologize for not being too splashy and bright like other famous comets, like Hale-Bopp or Halley, to name just two of them. But still if you can get at a dark place, with little or no light pollution from man-made lights - hard to find nowadays - you can still see me maybe with your naked eyes or even better with binoculars. And who knows how long it will be until the next bright comet arrives, so do not miss this opportunity!
So, farewell and stay safe. You will soon forget me, but I will leave something behind, to remind you of my apparition. Specks of dust from my tail will continue around my orbit and will eventually slam into Earth's atmosphere and burn like a meteor. So, the next time you see a meteor in the night sky, it could be one that has been part of my once prominent tail. And if you do, do not forget the wish!

Details:
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Camera: Canon EOS 550D, mounted on tripod, unguided
Lens: Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II@f2.5
Frames: 32 x 8 secs each, ISO 3200
Processing: Developed in Lightroom Classic 9.3, stacked with Sequator (set to Accumulation, Align stars) and final processing in Adobe Photoshop v.21

   

Taken on: July 22, 2020

Tags:

Neowise

50mm

Stars

Deep_Sky

550D

Canon

2020

Astrophotography

Sequator

Sky

Long_Exposure

C/2020

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Camera: Canon EOS 550D, f/2.5, 256 sec, 50mm, ISO 3200 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon EOS 550D
Aperture:	f/2.5
Exposure Time:	256
Focal Length:	50mm
ISO:	3200
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 9.3 (Windows)
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