I took the pictures above with my camera mounted directly on the telescope mount. The aperture was wide open, and the speed and exposure time set to maximum. Click on "play" to show the sequence, or select the date to display a particular picture. The brightness and contrast is not consistent - sodium street lights caused a colour cast on the first picture. The sky is blue in the picture from 22 November due to the nearly full Moon.
The comet was plainly visible to the naked eye, looking just like the adjacent stars. (Mirfak in Perseus is the bright one in the centre.) It was only expected to be a very dim object but surprised everyone by detonating, becoming larger than the Sun and half a million times brighter than expected. With my telescope the comet appeared so large that I needed to use the lowest magnification. The pictures below were taken on the same dates, with the camera mounted in place of the eyepiece. This gives a focal length of 1000mm.
The scale is the same in each picture, but they are rotated by slightly different angles, depending on how I mounted the telescope in the rings.
At the bottom of the page is a time lapse video I created from the photographs, posted on YouTube in 2020.
