It would be easy to spot with good binoculars and maybe even with the naked eye, as long as the sky isn’t illuminated by city lights or the moon.
Astronomers said a newly discovered comet could be visible to the naked eye as it zooms 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) after the Zwicky Traffic Facility — a public-private partnership aimed at studying the night sky — which was first spotted passing through Jupiter in March of last year, when it was at 399 million miles from the sun. .
After traveling from the frozen wastes of our solar system, it will approach the Sun on January 12 and pass close to the Earth on February 1. Then, the comet will pass within 26 million miles of Earth on Feb. 2.
It would be easy to spot with good binoculars and maybe even with the naked eye, as long as the sky isn’t illuminated by city lights or the moon. However, while the comet will be brightest as it passes Earth in early February, the full moon could make it difficult to spot.
You can watch the free live show via the channel Virtual Telescope Project on me Youtube If you don’t have the right conditions or materials to watch C/2022 E3 (ZTF).
Thomas Prince, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology who works at the Zwicky passage facility, told AFP that the comet “will be brighter the closer it is 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 the comet to be 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 the Heaven’s Gate cult-associated comet Hale-Bopp – which passed in 1997, with a diameter of about 37 miles.
The comet’s latest visit will bring it closer to Earth, Beaver said, which comforts the fact 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 on the weekend of January 21-22 offers a good opportunity for stargazers.
“We may also get a nice surprise and the object could be twice as bright as expected,” added Beaver.
