Final image here: https://www.astrobin.com/eorqhv/

Leonard comet (C/2021 A1) caught while passing by the M3 globular cluster. I’m very excited and proud of this one as there’s a great story behind it.

Long story short: drove 620km, didn’t sleep for 2 days, spent a night in a remote location (moderate cold -4°C), met 2 astro addicts (in person) I had only known via chat before, produced 1 great photo.

A longer story is this: weather has no mercy these days. I had maybe 2-3 nights during last 2 months. To capture Leonard being that close to M3 cluster one would have 2 hours. Comets move fast on the sky. In Poland we were lucky and timing was perfect - well, except the weather. Here where I live all forecasts were poor - no chance to capture this event. So I started looking for some other places I could go and have a chance but almost entire Poland was covered by clouds. Found a couple of locations but the closer to the event, forecasts weren’t promising for one of them. Eventually, after speaking to the mentioned astro addicts, we ended up in a remote location 300km South from my house, under a nice dark sky. While going there I was actually in a middle of a little snow storm  reached the destination before 10PM, set up, show a different object before the comet. After 4AM we were all set up and ready for Leonard and started shooting.

C/2021 A1 (Leonard) is a long period comet discovered by G. J. Leonard at the Mount Lemmon Observatory on 3 January 2021 when the comet was 5 AU (750 million km) from the Sun. This is the first comet discovered in 2021. After perihelion (nearest to the Sun) the comet will be ejected from the Solar System.

This shot is kind of a once in a lifetime and I like it so much. You can also find a lot of small galaxies scattered all over the image. I’m planning to write about it soon and show all the small ones. So far them most distant one I’m aware of (on this picture) is a galaxy more than 650M light-years away!