Chasing a comet

Last night I went out to spot the McNaught comet around sunset. Some friends, Mrs. Lemming, and I had failed to spot it the previous night, so I ran up Mt. Painter just in time to catch a beautiful sunset.



As the sunset progressed, I managed to get a picture with both the moon and Venus in the same frame, but the comet was still not visible.



Finally, the comet appeared. By then it was dark enough that my attempts at hand-held shots were pretty poor, but the darker the sky got, the more spectacular the comet became, until by 10 the tail was a huge fountain of light. Too bad I don’t own a tripod.