Nearly 300 million km farther from Earth at the time of this imaging on February 3rd than the far more popular and showy C/2022 E3 (ZTF), 2020 V2 has a "tear drop" or "tadpole" shape dust trail. Reaching Perihelion on May 8 at an estimated magnitude of 10.2, it does not reach its closest approach to Earth until September 17th at a projected magnitude of 9.8. Also thought to originate from the Oort Cloud like its namesake, C/2020 V2's closest approach to the sun will be 333,346,818 km (2.2 AU), as compared to C/2022 E3's closest approach of 166,386,266 km or 1.1 AU.
This particular night, I obtained a series of 60 second exposures of C/2020 V2 while waiting for C/2022 E3 to come into view. Unfortunately, half of the subs had to be tossed because of high level cirrus clouds, so this integrated image suffers from a lack of data and an artifact-filled background that ended up being too dark and smooth. Still, I wanted to share and to see if the "V" shaped tail that
@Dan Bartlett described so well was visible or not in this data set. The answer is,
I don't think so, but perhaps there is a slight eccentric green-tinged glow to the right of the nucleus and primary dust trail that might represent the "V" though I am not sure that isn't artifact from a fairly messy background. This comet will be around for a while, so I might consider shooting again with longer exposures given its relatively slow
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