Where is comet now

Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Discover World-Changing Science. Which direction should one look? When is the best time to watch? Does it matter where in the U. Would someone be able to take a good picture using a smartphone?

What is the comet going to do next? Why should anyone care about comets? Credit: Getty Images Can anyone predict when the next bright comet will come? Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter.

Sign Up. Support science journalism. Knowledge awaits. See Subscription Options Already a subscriber? Create Account See Subscription Options. Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription.

At approximately p. At that time, the comet will be 0. That's about Shining with a magnitude of 2. Skywatchers in the Northern Hemisphere will be able to spot the comet after sunset; it will be in the constellation of Ursa Major, just below the Big Dipper. And if you're unable to catch the naked-eye comet in the night sky during its close approach this evening, you'll have another chance to see the space rock in two live webcasts on Thursday July First, astrophysicist Gianluca Masi of The Virtual Telescope Project in Italy will stream live telescope views of the comet starting at 3 p.

You can watch it live here on Space. Hosted by Lowell Observatory director Jeff Hall and senior astronomer Dave Schleicher, the live discussion "will highlight the scientific importance of this 'dirty iceball' and how to view it," the observatory said in a statement. The Lowell Observatory's webcast will also stream live on Space.

If you haven't yet had a chance to check out Comet NEOWISE for yourself, you'll want to get a look at it sooner rather than later, as the comet has been dimming slightly over the past few days. As it slowly fades from view, the naked-eye comet will soon require telescopes or binoculars to be seen and, after it disappears, it won't be back again in our lifetime.

Because of its extremely long, elliptical orbit, the comet won't be back for another 6, years , NASA has said. At its farthest distance from the sun, called aphelion, the comet will be about AU 66 billion miles, or billion km away. Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering space. Follow us on Twitter Spacedotcom and on Facebook. More than 2. Something icy.

Something unimaginably old. Something big. However, it would take nearly seven years for researchers to identify that strange dot of light as a huge primordial comet—possibly the biggest ever studied with modern telescopes.

Called Bernardinelli-Bernstein, the comet was announced in June, and researchers have now compiled everything they know about it in a discovery paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters. He co-discovered the comet during the final weeks of his Ph.

If so, the comet should be visible in with a decent backyard telescope. But Bernardinelli-Bernstein is also notable for how far it was from the sun when it was first spotted. The icy object hails from the Oort cloud, an enormous spherical haze of objects that surrounds the sun thousands of times farther out than Earth. Astronomers calculate that this comet takes millions of years to circle the sun.

Because it was discovered so early, a generation of astronomers will have the opportunity to unravel its mysteries. But images taken to study dark energy and other cosmic phenomena can also be used to discover objects much closer to home. For his Ph.

He faced a tall order. Each image was so massive, displaying just one at full resolution would require a grid of HD televisions. Bernardinelli scoured tens of thousands of these images for dots of light a few pixels wide. As a final step, Bernardinelli and Bernstein checked this list by hand to make sure the code did its job correctly. On June 19, the center confirmed that the object was a new discovery. In a matter of days, astronomers all over the world began turning their telescopes toward the incoming object and scouring their archives for any other images of it that had gone unnoticed.

Researchers soon found the comet hiding in archival data as far back as , improving the accuracy of its known orbit. And within 24 hours of the announcement, multiple teams of astronomers had confirmed that the comet was releasing enough dust and gas to make a visible coma, or tail, even though it was still more than two billion miles from the sun.

More clues about its tail came from images taken in and by TESS, an exoplanet-hunting space telescope operated by NASA that also captured images of the incoming comet. Eventually, they found an extremely faint signal hiding in their data—and learned that the comet had started giving off gas as far as 2.