Comet Leonard

Denise Moser, David McCallie and David Young have visual on the comet at 4:30 and images acquired at 4:45 a.m. We'll upload images later today.

Naked-eye? Binocular? Telescope? Imaged?

I found it in the 30" first. I aligned on Arcturus and then sent the scope to the coordinates we got from Sky Safari and Stellarium. I put Leonard in the Stellarium data base last week. The comet was in the field of view of the 40mm eyepiece. We centered and changed to the 34 mm. Nice greenish coma but couldn't see much of the long tail visually. We changed out to the ZWO camera and started imaging. A nice tail showed up in the images. The comet is moving so fast that the head was blurred in under a minute. Denise couldn't locate it with her binoculars so we got out the club's 11 X 80 binoculars and put them on her binocular mount. I found it in those in a few seconds. Just swept up from Arcturus like I was looking for M-3 and bingo. It's moving very fast and will be cruising by M-3 soon.

I seen it this morning at 5:30am from my urban Raymore backyard with 10x50 binoculars. Very unimpressive. It was directly below M3, and slightly fainter. Would have never located it without knowing what i was looking for, or where to look for it.

I saw it at the DSS this morning at about 3:00am using my 18" Dob. I could see both the comet and M3 in the same field of view with a 31mm Nagler.