A few days ago I headed down to Sedona to try getting another set of images of Comet C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy. Although I did get the images, I was unable to create a final product that showed the stars and the comet well. I suspect there was too much light pollution and it overwhelmed the delicate tail.

I also shot star trails with the camera pointed toward Cathedral Rock. The moon was still below the horizon when I started the sequence of images but rose above the horizon and illuminated the rock at the end. The result, after stacking and compositing the images was pretty good. But I was interested in trying out a popular technique of making the star trails look more like, well, comets. There is software available to do this but I was willing to do it the old-fashioned way using manual labor—at least this one time. The result came out well. If only the night sky actually looked like this!