A comet will grace New England skies this fall. And if things go as planned, it will be bright enough to be visible to the unaided eye.
“You'll be able to just go out and see it,” Kelly Beatty, senior editor of Sky & Telescope, told Boston Public Radio on Wednesday. It will look like “a bright spot with a tail ... like a little fan.”
The comet named Tsuchinshan-ATLAS will pass between the Earth and Sun in early October. This cluster of dust and ice is named after the two observatories that discovered it, the Purple Mountain Observatory in China and the ATLAS robotic telescope.
While scientists have a good idea when the comet will be visible from Earth, what’s unknown is how bright it will be. This depends on how the sun will illuminate the comet’s features.
“Imagine … you have a dirty windshield and the sun's on the other side. Your windshield lights up with all the dust. That's a scattering process. This comet could do the same thing and become much brighter than predicted if it's got a lot of very fine particles of dust,” Beatty explained.
Tsuchinshan-ATLAS will be visible in the predawn sky in early October 2024. Then around the second week of October, it will be visible in the evening sky after sunset.
