…and there’s the comet.

See it? No? Here. Let me assist a little.

There it is. The best shot I have of wonderful C/2022 E3 ZTF, the almost-nameless comet and rightfully so; it kinda sucked.

I refer to my last post, or second to last post, here. I was dying of a lack of sunlight and the clouds were also fucking up my one chance to see this possibly-bright comet. It was cloudy for more than a month! I couldn’t even attempt to look for it! I sick with a case of FOMO. The hype-train left the station and I was screaming along for the ride. The comet was blue-balling me. And so on.

And there were the pictures from Instagram, refer back to the last post again because I do not feel like linking more Insta comet pics; they made me angry and depressed. There was that beautiful comet up in the sky for my eyes to gaze at, except for the clouds!, and these Insta pics proved what I knew. I was missing out.

After one of our countless mini-snowstorms over the last few weeks the skies cleared, preceded by a three-minute long sunset blasting under the cloud layer before the night fell. The moon was barely a crescent and Jupiter was hanging nearby. They both had a halo around them, the sky cooling and full of moisture making the skies slightly hazy. Devoid of clouds and fog, yes, but not very clear.

On the ride home from work I looked hopefully for a bright and obvious comet. Nope, nothing obvious. The light pollution and haze didn’t help, but the binoculars at home would bring it out…

After hunting for five whole minutes I stumbled across a slightly brighter patch in the sky. At the center it looked like a star, a very tiny star, but when you looked right at it it’d disappear. This is called averted vision — the cells on your peripherical are better at detecting faint light — and looking away can sometimes let you see faint objects such as comets.

Was that it?

There was no tail, no color, just a vague sort-of-brighter patch in the sky that I wasn’t even sure was there. Maybe it was my imagination.

I propped my Shitty Samsung S10 up on a bag of salt outside and set a massive 20-second exposure time. Something ISO, something F-value, I don’t recall, and obtained a workable pic. After some goofing in Lightroom, here’s the full image.

That’s the comet. That’s the fuzzy ball I was stressing out for for over a month about. I thought I was missing a beautiful show. I thought I was missing a highlight of my life. A rare and beautiful comet creeping across the winter night skies. Cutting through the Dippers making it even easier to find and ever so prominent in the crisp January skies.

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope, nope, nope to all of those. Hell, the blog is called Everything Sucks: don’t get your hopes up kids.