It would be easy to spot with good binoculars and perhaps even with the naked eye, provided the sky was not illuminated by city lights or the moon.
Astronomers said a newly discovered comet might be visible to the naked eye as it passes away from Earth and the Sun in the coming weeks for the first time in 50,000 years.
The comet is called C/2022 E3 (ZTF) following the Zwicky Traffic Facility — a public-private partnership aimed at studying the night sky — that was first spotted crossing Jupiter in March last year when it was 399 million miles away. from the sun.
After traveling from the icy reaches of our solar system, it will approach the Sun on January 12 and pass near Earth on February 1. Then, the comet will pass within 26 million miles of Earth on February 2.
It would be easy to spot with good binoculars and perhaps even with the naked eye, provided the sky was not illuminated by city lights or the moon. However, while the comet will be brighter as it passes Earth in early February, the full moon may make it difficult to spot.
You can watch free live show via channel Virtual Telescope Project on me YouTube If you do not have the right conditions or materials to watch C/2022 E3 (ZTF).
Thomas Prince, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology who works at the Zwicky passage facility, told AFP that the comet “will be brightest when it is closer to Earth.”
It is made of ice and dust and emits a green halo, said Nicolas Biver, an astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory, and estimates that the comet is less than a mile in diameter.
This makes it much smaller than the last comet visible to the naked eye – NEOWISE, which passed Earth in March 2020, and Comet Hale-Bopp associated with the cult of Heaven’s Gate – which passed in 1997, with a diameter of regarding 37 miles.
The comet’s most recent visit will bring it closer to Earth, Beaver said, which takes some consolation that it’s not very big.
For the Northern Hemisphere, he saw that in the last week of January, the comet would pass between the planets Ursa Minor and Ursa Major. He said the new moon over the weekend of January 21-22 provides a good opportunity for stargazers.
“We might also get a nice surprise, and the object might be twice as bright as expected,” Beaver added.
