For a couple of days, as the much-watched comet NEOWISE faded and dimmed into the stellar blackness, there were two comets (actually 3) that could be seen, and photographed, in the same camera frame. This image was taken on the night of August 9, 2020, from Carrs Mill Park in Maryland. NEOWISE is clearly much brighter with a clear dust tail visible (and just a hint of the ion tail streaming straight away from the sun at the lower left edge of the visible tail), while PANSTARRS is far fainter, with just a smudge of a tail visible. The fascinating thing about this image, however, is that the two comet's tails do NOT point in the same direction! While NEOWISE's tail points away from the sun (as it should), PANSTARR's faint tail appears to point about 90-degrees from the sun (toward the upper right in this image). Just why this is so, I suspect is due to the 3D geometry of the orbits (both comets orbits are inclined significantly from the ecliptic)....and I did manage to confirm that the two tails do indeed point in different directions at the COBS database, as shown in the plots below. Note that in mid-August (image made on Aug 9, 2020), the tail position of NEOWISE was approximately 80-90 degrees, or nearly due East, while that of Panstarrs was approximately 330 degrees, or NNW.

Below is an orbital plot (taken from 'theskylive.com') showing the orbits of both comets, as well as the earth and sun, on August 9, 2020. I have sketched in the approximate direction of each comet's two tails. The comet's tails are NOT in the direction of the comet's travel, as one my intuit, but are blown outward by the solar wind. The ion tail is shown in purple, and points directly away from the sun; the ion tail is made up of charged particles, and constrained to follow the sun's magnetic field lines, which generally point directly away from the sun. The dust and gas tail, shown in yellow, is initially blown outward by the solar wind, but since these particles have no electrical charge, they begin to follow their own orbital path around the sun. Since they are blown outward and now have a larger orbital radius than the comet, they move more slowly and the tail takes on its characteristic curved shape, away from the comet's orbital motion. Looking at the position of the earth in the plot, you can see that the angle of the sun-comet vector is significantly different from our line-of-sight vector for the two comets. In essence, we are looking more along the sun-comet axis for PANSTARRS than for NEOWISE, and I believe this is why the tails of the two comets do not appear to lie in the same direction from our vantage point.