Giant snowball
Comet Catalina will be streaking by the Earth from a pretty close distance, or close considering that it is around 10 kilometres wide. How close? It will pass from a distance of about 110 million kilometres (68 million miles). Science writer Andrew Fazekas told media it is coming from a long ways away.
“You can basically think of it as a giant, dirty snowball that happens to be about 10 kilometres across,” Fazekas, who writes for National Geographic, said. “What it is is basically this object that’s come from the edge of the solar system, way beyond where Pluto is.
“And every once in a while,” Fazekas added. “Their orbits get out of sync from where it used to be orbiting, and the sun’s gravity begins to pull it towards it.”
Near Big Dipper
What CBC reporter Emily Chung describes as a “green, two-tailed” comet is also called C/2013 US10 (comets have boring, numerical names so are inevitably given sexier ones, too).
It will be passing very near to the Big Dipper, so aim your binoculars (or telescope) in that direction and you’ll see Catalina. Astrophotographer Paul Klauninger told Chung it should be “fairly easy to spot right now” and that Catalina is “very close to the end star in the handle of the Big Dipper.”
It will not be visible to the naked eye, he said. EarthSky, an astronomy website, notes that “binoculars should reveal it as a small fuzzy patch of light in the sky after midnight and before dawn.”
It is so far away you will notice its movement only by pinpointing its position then looking again 15 minutes later to gauge how far it traveled in the ensuing time.
