Back Yard Comet?

Lousy Conditions

Comet Lovejoy (C/2014 Q2) has become well placed for observation from my house. On December 30th the comet was in the constellation Lepus, below Orion, and well above my southeastern horizon an hour or so before midnight. I quickly found the comet with binoculars. Glaring lights from nearby houses were extremely annoying, but they did not prevent clear views of the comet's fuzzy greenish coma in both my 11X80 binoculars and my 25X100 binoculars. 

Bright moonlight lit the sky. Neighborhood Christmas lights added their glow to numerous unshielded porch lights and window lights from surrounding houses. Nevertheless, I tried to photograph the comet from my back yard. The image below is a 30-second unguided exposure at ISO 1600.

You can see how bright the sky is, particularly near the bottom of the picture closer to the roof of a nearby house. Unless you know where to look the comet is hard to see. In the next picture I modified the brightness levels and cropped the view. It looks a little better, but the comet is quite small and not immediately obvious.

Next is a labeled version of the previous picture so you can see where the comet is. Click on the image below for a slightly better view.

Comet Lovejoy was certainly not a "knock your socks off" naked eye comet on December 30th. Long exposures through telescopes yielded some very nice views of the coma and tail, but the wide angle unguided pictures I took showed only a small fuzzy spot. I may try my luck again when the Moon begins to wane after January 4th.