Patience Rewarded

Ladies & gentlemen, I give you Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS!!

It’s far enough away from the Sun so that about an hour after sunset it just popped right into view, in the binoculars at first, then easily visible to the naked eye!

These first two pictures are from my iPhone 13, normal 1x zoom first, then the standard 3x zoom. I was using a tripod and the iPhone used a 4.8 second exposure.

By the time I got the Canon with the telephoto lens set up, the head of the comet was just touching the top of Castle Peak from my front yard viewpoint.

So I hustled down the hill a few houses to where I can peek a bit more around the side of Castle Peak. (The streak at the upper right is an airplane headed down the coast off of Ventura County toward LAX.)

I only had a minute or two before the comet started setting below the mountain from the better viewpoint.

If you want to look for yourself, here’s a wide-angle view with some labels. Go outside about an hour after sunset and look due west. You might see the comet right away, like a little puff of lint or a dandilion seed floating 44 million miles away, but if not, find Venus. It will be BRIGHT. (If it’s moving, that’s an incoming 737, not Venus.) If it’s getting dark, two of the brightest other stars you’ll see in the west will be Antares to the southwest and Arcturus to the northwest. The comet right now is a little above the height of Venus and it will be creeping “upward” every night, and also getting dimmer every night as it hauls ass out of the solar system and heads back toward deep space for another 80,000 years. It’s about halfway between Venus and Arcturus. If you have a pair of binoculars, start slowly sweeping that area of the sky, and you’ll soon spot the comet, with its tail pointing up away from the Sun and the horizon. (The tail always points away from the Sun, since it’s ice and dust expelled from the comet as it heats up and then the ice and dust are blown away by the solar wind.)

The comet is probably past its brightest, but it’s now getting further away from the Sun which makes it much easiet to see. You should be able to spot it with the naked eye for at least a few days, and with binoculars for the rest of October at least. If you get clouded out in the next couple of days, don’t give up!

Happy comet hunting!