Why in my area does NEOWISE appear so dim and small? So, I was always amazed by images of NEOWISE around the Internet like this:

Or this:

Yet, all my efforts to see it or photograph it in its full glory were fruitless...

22.07.2020 22:01
Here you can barely see it at the bottom-left of the image...

24.07.2020 22:00
Here is the zoomed version... Very very blurry. The point is that I couldn't even see it with my &quot;naked eye&quot; (well I couldn't see it even if it were much brighter, because I use glasses, and that's automatically not &quot;naked eye&quot;, but yea). The maximum that I could see was just some smudge. With 5x binoculars I could see it, again super dim and blurry. I decided to purchase a telescope specially for this, and although I could see Jupiter's moons and Saturn's ring quite clearly, I had no success with NEOWISE. Both at 56x and 140x zoom the comet seemed super blurry and dim. Although stars around it were in good focus, no matter how I tried to focus the comet itself, it always seemed out of focus...
BTW, these 2 shots were taken at the closest approach to Earth around 2
So I thought, maybe it's because of light pollution? I live in a not-super-giant city, but a light pollution map showed some amount of pollution still. So I went to a light grey area (only one step brighter than black) on the map. This, however didn't change much at all...

25.07.2020 22:32
The comet is still very dim and small. I couldn't find it with the &quot;naked eye&quot; reliably. Its size is almost the same as surrounding stars, yet on other people's photos it appears like 10 times bigger than the stars around it!
What could be the reason for this? If not light pollution, maybe it's that my location is very bad for viewing it? I'm located in southern Ukraine, Kherson city.
There's one main reason - and maybe some other reasons as well:
The primary reason is the date the photos were taken you compare your photo with. Two weeks ago (10th July 2020), the brightness of the comet was around 1 - 2 magnitudes - that is comparable to the brighter stars and it was readily visible with the unaided eye on onset of nautical twilight. A week later already (17th July) it moved further from the sun and it was only around 3.5 magnitudes (personal guestimate from comparison with surrounding stars like some from Canis Minor) - thus it needed already a dark sky to be nicely visible. Now is already another week past and its heliocentric distance increased further, its brightness dropped to something comparable to the stars just barely visible with the naked eye. Conversely its activity also reduced dramatically with increasing heliocentric distance. As it meanwhile has past its perihelion as well as closest approach to Earth, it's meanwhile both effects adding up: geometry and much less material to scatter the sunlight due to reduced activity.
See this animation for a trajectory.
While the pure physics above are the main reason for the difference, other reasons might be the amount and skill of post-processing done on images. People might have stacked several photos in order to gain a higher noise-to-contrast ratio and applied a logarithmic brightness curve or similar.