After being treated to an encore of the Northern Lights in recent weeks, skywatchers in Humboldt County have the chance to view another celestial phenomena in the comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS.
In what NASA describes as a “once-in-80,000-years sight,” the comet will be visible low in the horizon to the west after sunset, with the best likelihood for a sighting set for tonight through Oct. 24 as it makes a close pass by Earth, coming within some 44 million miles.
“If the comet’s tail is well-illuminated by sunlight, it could be visible to the unaided eye,” according to NASA.
A forecaster with the Eureka office of the National Weather Service caught a glimpse of the comet from the overlook on Bald Hills Road last night, according to a social media post from the agency.
“The comet will continue to be visible for the next week or so in the western sky beginning 45 minutes to an hour after sunset. Cloud cover will be the big question, of course, with fog potential for coastal areas,” the post states, adding the region might have a good shot tonight “with high clouds potentially waiting until after the best viewing.”
The NWS notes conditions “will be much more questionable Tuesday through Thursday and the comet will become less bright each night.”
Scientists had thought the comet might break up while approaching the sun in late September due to “its volatile and icy composition [being] unable to withstand the intense heat of our parent star, but it survived more or less intact,” a NASA article states.
“Comets are more fragile than people may realize, thanks to the effects of passing close to the sun and their internal water ice and volatiles such as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide,” NASA astronomer Bill Cooke, who leads the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, says in the article. “Comet Kohoutek, which reached the inner solar system in 1973, broke up while passing too close to the sun. Comet Ison similarly failed to survive the sun’s intense heat and gravity during perihelion in 2013.”
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS — named for the two observatories, China’s Tsuchinshan Observatory and an ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) telescope in South Africa, where it was first identified — was discovered in 2023.
“The comet hails from the Oort Cloud, which scientists think is a giant spherical shell surrounding our solar system,” the NASA article states. “ It is like a big, thick-walled bubble made of icy pieces of space debris the sizes of mountains and sometimes larger. The Oort Cloud lies far beyond Pluto and the most distant edges of the Kuiper Belt and may contain billions, or even trillions, of objects.”
This article appears in Combating the Barred Owl Invasion.
