Image courtesy of Amtsgymnasiet - Sonderborg, Denmark.
This image was obtained by high school students at Amtsgymnasiet and EUC Syd (Sonderborg, Denmark) on 2002 December 18.81. It is a composite of 36 100-second exposures obtained with a telescope and an Apogee AP6E CCD camera. Other images of the comet obtained by this class are located on their webpage.
FINDER CHART:
Binoculars should be all you need to spot the new comet just before dawn in the last two weeks of December. (You can find when dawn begins at your site by entering your location into our almanac.) Start with the bright landmark stars Arcturus (top right) and Vega (lower left). The sky's position with respect to the horizon is shown very approximately. This horizon is drawn for skywatchers at 40° north latitude when dawn begins around the end of December. Before that date the comet will be less high than shown here; after that it will be higher than here. Stars are plotted to magnitude 6.8.