Astronomy Picture of the Day - Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS Flys Away

NASA ^ | 19 Oct, 2024 | Image Credit & Copyright: Xingyang Cai

[MtnClimber]

Explanation: These six panels follow daily apparitions of comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS as it moved away from our fair planet during the past week. The images were taken with the same camera and lens at the indicated dates and locations from California, planet Earth. At far right on October 12 the visitor from the distant Oort cloud was near its closest approach, some 70 million kilometers (about 4 light-minutes) away. Its bright coma and long dust tail were close on the sky to the setting Sun but still easy to spot against a bright western horizon. Over the following days, the outbound comet steadily climbs above the ecliptic and north into the darker western evening sky, but begins to fade from view. Crossing the Earth's orbital plane around October 14, Tsuchinshan-ATLAS exhibits a noticeable antitail extended toward the western horizon. Higher in the evening sky at sunset by October 17 (far left) the comet has faded and reached a distance of around 77 million kilometers from planet Earth. Hopefully you enjoyed some of Tsuchinshan-ATLAS's bid to become the best comet of 2024. This comet's initial orbital period estimates were a mere 80,000 years, but in fact it may never return to the inner Solar System.

[MtnClimber]

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[MtnClimber]

[MtnClimber]

Pinging the APOD list

🪐 🌟 🌌 🍔

[telescope115]

It’s a great sequence of images. Wednesday and Thursday night I managed to get images of it on my cellphone. They look like the 10/16 and 10/17 images. 10 second exposures on my IPhone 11, handheld. What’s weird is I couldn’t actually SEE it. I just pointed at that part of the sky and took the picture, holding the phone as still as possible.

Lucky imaging…

[No name given]

Cool.

[qam1]

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS was the most disappointing thing since my son

[fella]

I looked but never saw the tail.

[Political Junkie Too]

I watched it every night from my light-polluted backyard with a pair of binoculars. It was clearly visible once the afterglow of the setting sun dissipated.

It was really only visible for about 30 minutes after sunset because it was just coming around from the sun and heading out of the solar system.

-PJ

[Captain Compassion]

I looked but didn’t see. It doesn’t help having 8,000-to-10,000-foot peaks 5 miles to the west of me.