Comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova gets its name from the three astronomers who discovered it in 1948. Comet 45P only visits the inner solar system every 5.25 years, and this trip will bring it only 7.4 million miles ( 12 million kilometers) from Earth, and while this may seem to be a stone’s throw away from the planet, it’s actually about 30 times the moon’s distance from the Earth, according to Live Science.
The fuzzy green comet will be zooming past the Earth at about 51,000 miles an hour when it makes its closest pass by the Earth on Saturday morning around 8 UT (3 a.m. EST). Using a small telescope or a pair of binoculars should let people get a view of the comet in the pre-dawn skies between Thursday and Sunday. The comet will be racing through the constellation Hercules high in the eastern sky,” notes SpaceWeather.com.
Will you see the comet? Probably not
Comet 45P will appear as a fuzzy, bluish-green ball with a somewhat fan-shaped tail. If you’re wondering where it gets its unusual color, it is due to the vaporizing of diatomic carbon, a gas that glows green in the near-vacuum of space. The comet’s estimated brightness at its closest and brightest is magnitude +7, outside the limit of seeing it with the naked eye.
Not only that, but you will need an extremely dark sky to see it even with a telescope. And the best time will be early Saturday when it will appear about 82 degrees west of the sun at maximum brightness. But there is one factor that will make comet 45P difficult to see, and that is the full moon.
The penumbral lunar eclipse of the snow moon
Any lunar eclipse requires a full moon, and on Friday night this week, we will have the “snow moon,” the name given to the February full moon by Native Americans in the northern and eastern U.S. And they hit it right on the nose with calling it the snow moon because February is the country’s snowiest month, according to the National Weather Service.
But Friday night’s moon won’t appear quite as bright as you might think because of a subtle eclipse that will occur. It’s not as spectacular as a total lunar eclipse, but if you watch closely, you will see it. People in the Western Hemisphere will be able to view the penumbral eclipse on Friday night and those in the Eastern Hemisphere will view it on Saturday night.
A penumbral eclipse occurs when the moon moves through the outer part of Earth’s shadow (known as the penumbra). The Earth’s outer shadow blocks part of the sun’s rays from reaching the moon, slightly darkening the moon as it orbits the Earth. The exact moment the eclipse will occur is at 7:43 p.m. ET (6:43 p.m. CT, 5:43 p.m. MT and 4:43 p.m. PT), NASA said.
