How to See the Bright Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas This Weekend

Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas will be bright enough to see with the naked eye, so don’t miss out on viewing this cosmic snowball this weekend.

The comet will be closest to Earth on Saturday but should be visible through the end of October given that there are clear skies.

To get the best view of the comet, go outside about an hour after sunset and look west. The comet should be visible from the northern and southern hemispheres.

While you can see the comet with the naked eye, binoculars and telescopes will give you a better view of it.

“It’ll be this fuzzy circle with a long tail stretching away from it,” Sally Brummel, planetarium manager at the Bell Museum in Minnesota, told The Associated Press (AP).

Origin of Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas

Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas, also known as C/2023 A3, is named after the observatories in China and South Africa that discovered it last year.

The comet came from the Oort Cloud, well beyond Pluto, a dwarf planet 3.6 billion miles from the Sun.

This trip will be the comet’s closest approach to Earth, about 44 million miles. It won’t return for another 80,000 years given it survives the trip.

What is a Comet?

Comets are frozen leftovers from the formation of the solar system. They are made up of dust, rock and ices. This description might be confusing given that many picture a comet to be a firey ball. Comets become those firey balls when they orbit close to the Sun. While orbiting near the Sun, comets heat up and spew gases and dust, forming a tail that stretches millions of miles.

Before a comet’s orbit brings it close to the Sun, it can range in size from a few miles to tens of miles wide. Afterward, the comet grows larger than most planets.

The National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) says on its website that there are likely billions of comets orbiting the Sun in the Kuiper Belt, which is a region of leftovers from the solar system, and the Oort Cloud, a much more icy distant region.

Larry Denneau, a lead researcher with the Atlas telescope that helped discover Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas, told the AP that several comets are found every year, but many burn up close to the sun or linger too far away to be seen without special equipment.

Some notable mentions of previous comets include Neowise in 2020 and Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake in the mid to late 1990s. More recently, in 2023, a green comet that last visited Earth 50,000 years ago zipped by the planet again.

This article includes reporting from The Associated Press.