Friday night I was at the Mount Burnett Observatory for the talk about the ASV’s New Astronomers Group (NAG), but we took a break from the talk shortly after sunset to look for the two comets in the southern sky that night, C/2011 PANSTARRS and C/2012 F6 Lemmon. It was a lovely clear night, though very windy, and we managed to see both of them. I’d brought my camera and tripod along and got these photographs:

Comet C/2011 PANSTARRS as seen from Mount Burnett Observatory

Comet C/2012 F6 Lemmon as seen from Mount Burnett Observatory

…and this time with a passing aircraft…

Then on Saturday night I got this photo of PANSTARRS from Upper Ferntree Gully, visible as a naked eye object.

Sadly PANSTARRS is heading off to the northern hemisphere so we may not get much more of it here in Australia.