SUNSET: 
0
Photographer:
Mike Olason
Location of Photo:
Tucson, Arizona
Date/Time of photo:
4 August 2021, 0650 UT
Equipment:
11" SCT and STF-8300M CCD Camera
Description:
In these images Comet C/2019 K7 (Smith) was magnitude 16.7, had a 13 arc second wide coma, a tail at least 0.15 degrees long at a position angle of 122 degrees from the coma and was 509 million miles from the Earth, farther away than Jupiter. The comet was at perihelion in it's orbit last June 2020 at 416 million miles from the Sun when it brightened to magnitude 14 and when it also made it's close approach to Earth in June 2020 at 339 million miles. The comet's tail is hard to see with that magnitude 5 star brightening the sky, but it stretches from the comet coma at the upper right of the images above the background magnitude 5 star to the lower left of the images, at least 0.15 degrees long, not bad for a comet 0.5 billion miles from the Earth.
