The hill? Quality. The comet? Kinda meh.

What, there was another interesting thing in the sky right after the aurora? Darker skies probably would have been better, but I was still recovering from the drive to Omaha the previous weekend, and was heading to Chicago in a few days for Open House weekend. My compromise was heading downtown to a part of the city I hadn't been to before, the Quality Hill area. When I worked downtown I never really went west of Main Street, since not a lot of restaurants past there.

Got downtown way before sunset and walked around for a bit. I didn't realize you could see Worlds of Fun from downtown, and cable stayed bridges are neat, though there was a giant ugly billboard that I tried to keep out of frame, and was mostly successful.

With time still to kill before dusk, I wandered a bit more, and got some nice pictures of One Kansas City Place during golden hour.

As darkness approached, I plopped down on a railing at an overlook and waited for the stars to come out. With a star map app on my phone I had a rough idea of where to look. Venus became visible, then other bright stars, and eventually I was able to see a bit of a smudge. However, pointing my camera at it proved annoying, since I needed a decently long exposure to make it show up, even with high ISO. I snagged it in a few wide angle shots, but couldn't reliably zoom in on it.

Then I realized I'm a dumbass and had my tripod in my car, walked the two blocks there and back to retrieve it, and almost immediately was able to zoom in on it and get some pictures. Though with looking over the western suburbs of KC, in the direction of the Kansas Speedway, there was so much light pollution, leading to not great comets.

Oh well, there'll be other comets.