Cape Canaveral, Florida. The dirty snow globe last visited us in Neanderthal times, according to NASA. It will come within 42 million kilometers (26 million miles) on Wednesday before receding again, probably not to return for millions of years.
Discovered less than a year ago, the harmless green comet is visible in the northern night sky with binoculars or small telescopes, and possibly with the naked eye in the darkest corners of the Northern Hemisphere. It will get brighter as it gets closer and higher over the horizon until the end of January. The best hours to see it will be shortly before dawn. By February 10 it will be close to Mars, a good indication.
Southern hemisphere astronomy buffs will have to wait until next month to catch a glimpse of it.
While many comets have graced the sky in the past year, “this one seems to be a little bigger and therefore a little brighter and comes a little closer to Earth’s orbit,” said the comet and asteroid guru from NASA, Paul Chodas.
The green tint comes from carbon in the gas cloud surrounding the core. The comet was discovered in March of last year by astronomers using the Zwicky Transient Facility, a wide-field camera at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory. Its official name is C/2022 E3 (ZTF).
It will pass between the orbits of Earth and Mars on Wednesday at a relative speed of 207,000 km/hour (128,500 mph). Its core is estimated to be 1,600 meters (one mile) in diameter and its tails extend millions of kilometers (miles).
It’s not projected to be as bright as the Neowise of 2020 or the Hale Bopp and Hyakutake of the mid to late 1990s.
But “it will be bright by virtue of its close passage to Earth … allowing scientists to do more experiments and people to see a beautiful comet,” Karen Meech, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii, said in an email.
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