People have been able to spot it best with binoculars, though some claim to be able to see it with the naked eye. “Comets are very funny, fickle creatures.”įor much of last week, NEOWISE has been showing up just above the northeastern horizon, about an hour or so before sunrise in the Northern Hemisphere. “Not enough to destroy it, we don’t think, but enough to really make the surface sizzle and throw off a lot of material.” “You take something that’s a really big hunk of ice and rock all mixed together, and you park it very close to the Sun, it’s gonna set off some fireworks,” says Mainzer. NEOWISE is a pretty sizable comet, too, measuring about 3 miles (or 5 kilometers) across, which is why we can get this great view of it from Earth. On July 3rd, NEOWISE came closer to the Sun than the orbit of Mercury, and that flyby caused much of the icy material to cook, erupting as gas and dust. That’s what’s happening with NEOWISE right now. The Sun heats up the ice, turning it into gas that envelopes the comet. These ices are pretty well mixed throughout a comet, and it’s this material that gives comets their trademark fuzzy tails. Comets, on the other hand, are often a mixture of rock and all sorts of ices - including water, carbon dioxide, ammonia, and more. While they may have some ice trapped inside of them, they look more or less like big chunks of dry rock. Asteroids are typically pretty rocky in nature.
The difference between an asteroid and a comet mainly comes down to ice. I hope you like it! /sGZBiEVryM- Kerry LH July 5, 2020 It's not often that we get the opportunity to see or photograph a comet of this brightness and with a tail. Comet NEOWISE and the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada ! I was up really early for this shot.
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