Are you trying to see it without binoculars? If so, yeah, dark skies are your friend. My impression is that you are unlikely to see a tail without magnification, but I can’t swear to that. It is climbing a bit higher each night, so it will still be above the horizon later past twilight, which should help you.
Also, it looks from the charts that “extend the line made by the bottom of the Big Dipper” is no longer the way to find it. More like “extend the line made by the handle”
Southern Maine is supposed to be clearing tonight and Neowise should be visible 45 minutes after sunset. Decisions decisions…watch Hamilton with the fam or sky watch with the new 🔭?
I’ve been using an iPhone app Sky Guide, which… it’s hard to say if it’s accurate or not. I mean it gets stuff like Jupiter and the Moon right! But it has this AR mode which is, tb completely h, the first time i’ve ever used any AR application ever.
I use sky guide as well and it seems pretty accurate. Except the other night when N switched to S for no reason. And I couldn’t get the app to realign properly even restarting. Hehe.
It did show Neowise a bit higher in the sky than I t nought it would be. But I think it was pretty close once I spotted it.
It also confirmed we were watching the ISS fly over the other night which is cool.
I’ve definitely been able to see the tail with the naked eye. It’s most noticeable using peripheral vision, but both nights I’ve seen it I’ve been able to identify it that way. Last night we went to the beach and had the binoculars to get a better view.
Beautiful night in the NY region right now - and the comet is not as bright as it was a week ago, but still an easy binocular object. Should be visible for the next few hours! Go out and look at the big dipper, then lower your gaze until you see a triangle
Tonight (only) it forms a perfect triangle with two other stars - the tail the explanation point jutting out of the top vertex!
Alas it was too windy to get a good shot tonight with the tripod - but this gives you an idea…
So i had to drive 3 hours into the mountains to get a decent chance of seeing it yesterday. Left around 5:30pm. By the time i got there storms to the west threatened to block the view.
I managed to find a grassy entrance way to the McDonald Observatory, now closed because of COVID, along with several other parties of comet watches. I guessed that the hint of a smear through the clearing clouds was the comet, and took some long exposure photos. Unfortunately my inexperience, my inability to see anything in the pitch dark, meant that the tiny smear through the clouds that was the comet but not in focus. ;/ Kind of unhappy i didn’t manage a better shot.
Using a fast 55mm f/1.8 prime and a 16mm-50mm f3.5/5.6
Interestingly i had to take my UV filter off of the 55mm to get it to work. It was blocking most of the starlight. With it on the star photos were dim and had hardly any light through at all. Just FYI!
Finally we had clear skies last night. I live south of Portland so I had to drive north of the city to find a dark place. The comet was fairly visible to the naked eye but I could see it quite well with my telescope. There were a few other folks at the place I went to one of them had binoculars. They were psyched that a guy had shown up with a telescope everyone got so excited they started to forget to social distance and crowded around the telescope. We sorted it all out and had a jolly time as Saturn and Jupiter are also quite bright in the sky right now.
I went to a marina last night, because I have too many houses and tall trees outside of Seattle. The comet finally became visible at about 10:15 or 10:30.Barely. I went to Edmonds Marina, and even then there’s still a ton of light pollution. Managed to acquire it on my camera and took a few minutes to find the ideal combination of ISO and shutter speed, but the window closed really fast due to clouds coming in from the coast. It was barely visible in binoculars, too. If you want to see it with a naked eye, find somewhere really dark and away from cities.
