#comets

#comets

A Green Comet Will Go Near The Earth Again Since The Stone Age This object came a very long way, indeed.For the very first time since the Stone Age, a ball of ice named C/2022 E3 (ZTF) will be going near the Earth. According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the celestial object is estimated to be about 26 million miles from Earth on February 2.Astronomers believe that this distance is the closest the comet will be to the Earth in 50,000 years. While that distance may seem too far, the icy comet is burning so bright that there is a possibility that we could see it in the night sky. NASA states that while comets are generally unpredictable, this particular one has a big chance of being easily spotted by binoculars."[...]If this one continues its current trend in brightness, it'll be easy to spot with binoculars, and it's just possible it could become visible to the unaided eye under dark skies," the organization wrote in an update last year.The moniker “green comet” comes from its description. The space object is said to have a "greenish coma, short broad dust tail, and long faint ion tail." The color is linked to dicarbon, a molecule that emits the color as the sunlight decays it.Image credit: Mike Hankey#comets #dicarbon #space #NASA

Photographer Andrew McCarthy Captured a Stunning Photo of the Comet Leonard or the "Christmas Comet" from his BackyardAndrew McCarthy snapped stunning photos of Comet Leonard as it passed by our planet. The photographer went outside in his backyard and took photographs of the comet for about 12 minutes. In an Instagram post, McCarthy shared that he couldn’t see the comet with his eye alone, and used binoculars to see it clearly. “You can actually capture it with just a cell phone if you know where to look!” He added. The photographer used a modified SCT telescope to capture 25 separate 30-second exposures. In order to achieve the gorgeous photo of the comet above, McCarthy stacked the 25 frames together to achieve the zoomed-in effect as well!Image credit: Andrew McCarthy#photography #comets #space