trying for comet

So the comet Neowise is making a once-in-several-millennia pass by the earth, and the local weather guy here commented that last night would be a good night to see it.

So, late in the evening, I decided: heck, I can't do anything else, maybe I can drive out to the edge of town and find an unobstructed NW view and see it.

(In the before-times, maybe I'd have called someone to go with me. My night vision is not great and driving at night sometimes makes me nervous. Or maybe not: I am not big about calling people for stuff on the spur of the moment)

But I grabbed my little binoculars and my phone and purse, and decided to set off shortly after 9 pm (they said 9:30 was the earliest you could probably see it). Drove out University, not quite sure where to go. It occurred to me if I went out to the lake and was willing to hike a bit, I could look out over the lake and see it - but the idea of a night hike, alone, in an area that probably has wild hogs, was not a good idea at all, even with a flashlight.

So instead, I turned north on 49th, figuring it would pretty quickly take me out into a rural area.

The one problem, though: my town is kind of in a "bowl" and also there are a lot of trees. Finding an unobstructed horizon is really hard. I kept driving. Not being familiar with 49th, I didn't know it ended - so then I turned west on what the map tells me is Folsom Road (but didn't know it was that at the time). Kept driving.  Eventually, I wound up on a gravel road - and still, no good view of the NW horizon.

After a bit of driving on the road, I got creeped out - it took a dip ahead of me and even with brights on I couldn't see what was up with it (and looking at the map online, it seems like it terminates abruptly at some point) and also I saw a sign saying something like "MINING AREA: NO TRESPASSING" and while I *think* the only "mining" sort of activity in this region is oil and gas wells (there may be a little limestone mining), I decided I wanted out of there - I didn't want to meet up with anyone. Most likely it would be a cop, and while my age, gender, and complexion means I'd be at lower risk of some kind of bad misadventure, I'm still pretty sure an average police officer would not be so accepting of a "I'm just trying to see the comet and I needed to find an area away from the city lights" explanation. Oh, maybe one in fifty would have an amateur interest in astronomy and maybe one in a hundred would say "Well, you don't want to be here, you want to be (some other place with a better view)"

I wound up having to do a multi-point turn; there was no turnoff and I was unwilling to drive farther in search of one. I was also really nervous because I didn't want to run in a ditch - getting stuck in a remote rural mining area at nearly 10 pm was definitely on my Do Not Want list.

But I got turned the right way, and got out of there. Felt better once I was back on Folsom Road proper, where there were houses and stuff. Never did see the comet - I saw what was probably Jupiter in the night sky but that was it. I didn't even see any stars so either it was too hazy or I just didn't get far enough from the city lights. (That's a surprising problem here, but a lot of people have security lights that are blazing bright).

I will also say a lot of my fellow drivers seem not to understand the concept of "turn down the high beams when you meet another car on the road" and that made driving home harder.

I might try again, I might not. I admit if this had happened in the pre-2016 era (when I was still teaching summers) or when I had eager research students, I probably would have invited students to meet up for us to carpool out somewhere where we could see it - if I had a little group with me I might even feel OK walking in the dark through the field site to get out to where we could see out over the lake to see the comet, but definitely not trying that on my own.

It's a minor disappointment, though: I would like to see the comet; I remember seeing Hale-Bopp back when it passed by in the late 1990s.