The Voyager 1 spacecraft took 35 years to leave the sun’s magnetic influence. It’s traveling one million miles each day. At that speed, it will take 300 years to reach the inner layer of the Oort Cloud. Then, it will take 30,000 years to get through it all. It’s that thick! This is where some comets come from.
— From NASA Science – Space Place illustration, below.
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, C/2023 A3 was discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in South Africa on February 22, 2023. Observers at Purple Mountain (Zijin Shin or Tsuchinshan) in China found the comet independently on images from January 9, 2023. Hence, the name Tsuchinshan-ATLAS.
As described in StarryNight7, most comets were discovered by and named for amateur astronomers until the inception of the earlier Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project. LINEAR was established to detect asteroids that might threaten Earth.
The popular astronomy and natural history website EarthSky.org has reported on the appearance of C/2023 A3 in Earth’s skies. A collection of photographs by amateur astronomers following the comet illustrates the articles. For a preview of what is coming to Berkshire skies, study the illustrations and captions posted in this issue of “Eyes to the Sky” and the articles at earthsky.org.
