The Devil Comet or 12P/Pons-Brooks is about to reach peak brightness, and can be seen with the naked eye.A recently discovered comet that may be brighter than Pons-Brooks should be visible in our night skies later this year.
"There's been some astonishingly beautiful photos coming out on social media of the comet taken from the Northern Hemisphere near the Andromeda Galaxy," Jonti Horner, an astronomer with the University of Southern Queensland, says. This is enough to see with the naked eye, but less bright than the brightest stars in the sky, which have a magnitude of -1.
It's hard to measure how large the comet is from so far away, and therefore how large the outbursts are, but estimates have put 12P/Pons-Brooks at about 17 kilometres on it's longest side. "Go and find somewhere dark, away from city lights," advises Donna Burton, an astronomer at the Milroy Observatory.She suggests using a free app like Star Walk or Night Sky as "they'll show you exactly where it is".Although the comet will be visible with the naked eye, Ms Burton suggests taking a pair of binoculars just in case, as you'll be more likely to see the tail and other features of the comet.
"But it's a comet we've never seen before, it's never come through the inner Solar System. It's what we'd call a long period comet. And they're even more notorious for being hard to predict."They may look like simple security cameras, but these devices are tracking meteors
Devil's Comet P12/Pons-Brooks C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) Astronomy
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