A rare comet lights up the night sky in October

NEW YORK – Prepare to spot a rare, bright comet.

The space rock is hurtling towards Earth from the outer reaches of the solar system and will make its next flyby on Saturday. It should be visible until the end of October provided the skies are clear.

Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas should be bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, but binoculars and telescopes provide a better view.

“It will be this fuzzy circle with a long tail extending from it,” said Sally Brummel, planetarium manager at the Bell Museum in Minnesota.

Comets are frozen remnants of the formation of the solar system billions of years ago. They heat up as they swing toward the sun, revealing their characteristic tails.

In 2023, a green comet that last visited Earth 50,000 years ago flew past the planet again. Other notable flybys included Neowise in 2020 and Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake in the mid to late 1990s.

The comet, also called C/2023 A3, was discovered last year and is named after the observatories in China and South Africa that discovered it.

It came from the so-called Oort cloud far behind Pluto. After its closest approach to Earth is about 71 million kilometers, it will not return for another 80,000 years – assuming it survives the journey.

According to Larry Denneau, a senior researcher at the Atlas telescope that helped discover the comet, several comets are discovered each year, but many burn up near the sun or remain too far away to be visible without special equipment.

If you want to spot the comet Tsuchinshan Atlas, go outside on a clear night about an hour after sunset and look west.

The comet should be visible from both the northern and southern hemispheres.

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