Q: What are comets, and why is this one green?Ī: Comets are clumps of dust and frozen gases, sometimes described by astronomers as dirty snowballs. But ZTF, with a camera that has a wide field of view, scans the entire visible sky each night and is well-suited to discover such objects.
“You just can’t beat what your eyes can see.”Ī: The comet is known as C/2022 E3 (ZTF) because astronomers discovered it in March 2022 using a telescope on Palomar Mountain in California called the Zwicky Transient Facility (or ZTF).Īt the time, the cosmic interloper was just inside the orbit of Jupiter and roughly one-25,000th as bright as the faintest star visible to the naked eye. “I get this tingly, magical feeling whenever I’m looking at something live through a telescope,” said Andrew McCarthy, an astrophotographer based in Florence, Arizona. But it is your best chance this year to view an object from the solar system’s distant, icy reaches. And be forewarned that it will look nothing like many of the images you’ve seen on the internet. That’s 110 times the distance to the moon.įrom the Northern Hemisphere, the cosmic visitor will be faintly visible to the naked eye – so faint that you will want to grab your favorite pair of binoculars and drive far from city lights. The comet has been steadily gaining brightness and will make its closest approach Thursday, when it comes within 26.4 million miles of the planet. A green-hued comet from the outer solar system is swinging through Earth’s neighborhood for the first time in 50,000 years.
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