undetectable?

[obrazell]

If I have the filter set to visible it does not show up at all, unlike in ST3.

Owen

[theskyhound]

There is indeed a problem with F3 in the Nightly Planner as shown in the attachment. For some reason it only thinks it is visible for  about a minute in the evening sky and therefore becomer not visible. The Ephemeris gives the correct best time I think. The program seems confused now it has gone circumpolar.

Owen

I can see that in this case it has set the best time to view in the evening, when it is better in the morning. That's a difficult special case to handle and I haven't had a lot of chances to test all the possible variations because it is rare. Try setting the left time slider to midnight.

[theskyhound]

As it turns out, setting the time slider doesn't fix the problem with it picking the evening over the morning in the Nightly Planner. I am working on a fix, among a few others, and if things go well, an update may be only a few days away.

A better fix for this problem is to use the Ephemeris:

Select 2020 F3 as the target object
Choose the Nightly Observing Ephemeris
Select today's date
Set it to display at least a month

Each line displays the best time to view the comet on that date. Right-click to open a chart.