Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) could soon shine very bright in Earth’s skies
will almost certainly become bright enough to see without optical aid; just your eyes and a dark site will suffice. It might even briefly brighten so much that you’ll be able to see itOr it might not. Comets are irritating that way. As Canadian comet hunter David Levy once quipped, “Comets are like cats: they have tails, and they do precisely what they want.”
These Oort Cloud objects are on incredibly long orbits, taking tens of thousands of years for a single pass around the sun. They may have an eccentricity just under 1, but as they travel sunward, the gravity of the outer gas giant planets can tweak them just enough to give them a hyperbolic orbit. The real question is how bright 2023 A3 will get—and when. The comet reaches perihelion, its closest approach to the sun,September 27, when it will be just 60 million kilometers out. That’s roughly the same distance from our star as Mercury, so the comet will be getting a big blast of heat and light. Because of our viewing geometry, it will be in Earth’s early-morning sky at that time, albeit very low on the horizon.
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