Comet C/2022 E3 - 29th January

Submitted by MrAstroThomas t3_10mv65i in space

Hey everyone,

Some people asked me how to find comet C/2022 E3 in the night sky, since they could not really work with some maps they found on the internet.

Thankfully, there is a "simple geometric constellation" on the 29th January. As some may know: If you take the 2 outer stars of the Big Dipper, extend the imaginary line between them by a factor of 6 you reach Polaris.

But extending it only by a factor of 4 leads to the comet! However, the comet is way fainter than the "big dipper stars" or Polaris, but hey, that's a starting point it guess.

I created a small short on this using Stellarium. Hope that helps some astronomy fans that join this amazing hobby :).

https://youtube.com/shorts/Uj7j5Qwpexk

Cheers,

Thomas

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Comments

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inesccosta t1_j65cq5q wrote

Yesterday I looked at the night sky hoping I could see the comet but I was not successful. I was able to identify the Big Dipper and the Small Dipper, I even used Stellarium and I was in a place with no lights but yet, no comet 🙁

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MrAstroThomas OP t1_j65ffar wrote

Replying to inesccosta (#1,536,548)

The comet is very faint and has a so-called apparent magnitude of around 6. What does it mean?

Small magnitude values correspond to brighter objects. Further, it is a logarithmic scale, but this Infos doesn't matter now. What matters is the following: the naked eye can see objects down to a brightness of 6. So the comet is currently in a state that is barely visible to the human eye. Further, you need a very dark sky without light pollution.

The brightness will change now, going up to 5.5 or even 5.2. But note: it is indeed faint!

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jeeepblack t1_j65n0az wrote

Gonna dust off my good pair of binoculars from the garage tonight.

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Ossificated t1_j675cgz wrote

Thank you! I was able to spot it. It's incredibly dim right now, but I was able to see it through my binoculars.

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