I pulled up to Fort Hill in Gorham, Maine (where a cop kicked me and my telescope out after dark a couple summers ago) about an hour after sunset on Wednesday night. The parking lot was already packed.
Dozens of people stood on the grass, gazing westward, toward the considerable horizon. I could hear several folks murmuring that they couldn’t see it.
I couldn’t either.
We were all there to get a glimpse of comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS as it makes perhaps its one-and-only trip through our solar system. But, looking up, the comet seemed like a frustrating no show.
Then, as our collective eyes began adjusting to the dark, and the sun got further below the horizon, it appeared — as a anticlimactic dim smudge, a few degrees above Venus.
“There it is,” one woman in mittens said, grasping the arm of a companion. “To the left of the flagpole.”
I saw it too, barely. But when I eyeballed it through my camera, with a four-second exposure, I was no longer disappointed. It was a spectacular, tail-streaking fireball.
Like all comets, Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is a giant, space-traveling dirty snowball made of ice and organic materials leftover after the formation of our very solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Its tail is made from dust and vaporizing gasses given off as it passes close to the heat of the Sun.
Earth scientists have never seen Tsuchinshan-ATLAS before and believe it originated in the Oort Cloud, beyond Neptune. It may have traversed our solar system before — but also maybe not. Nobody knows. It may never come back again, either, and get ejected from the solar system as it slingshots around the Sun. If it ever does come back, it’ll be hundreds of thousands of years from now and we’ll all be long gone.
So, go look at it. The forecast is calling for clear nights through the weekend.
To find the comet, look above the western horizon about an hour after sunset. Tsuchinshan-ATLAS will be above Venus, headed through the constellations Leo and Virgo. Use binoculars or a camera on a tripod, with a long exposure, to look for it.
Bring hot chocolate. Marvel at the universe.
