The skies of central Victoria were blessed by the visit of a very rare comet last month.
On Wednesday January 22, a fleeting glimpse of this rare phenomenon was captured by Bruce Hedge at Newham at about 10pm.
“It was bitterly cold, with a strong southeasterly blowing clouds across the sky towards the south west, but they parted intermittently, and I was able to get a few photos before Comet C/2024 G3 ATLAS set below the horizon,” he said.
The comet, a “dirty snowball of ice, rock and dust”, had come in from beyond the solar system, passed round the sun in early January, and was on its way back out billions of kilometres, to return in about 180,000 years.
Most comets are fleeting visitors to our skies, and this one was quite faint, barely visible to the naked eye. The photo is overexposed a little, which brings out the detail in the tail.
This comet was nowhere near as visible as the great comet of 2007, Comet McNaught, discovered by Australian Robert McNaught, and reaching maximum visibility around Australia Day 2007.
“I’ve seen a dozen or so comets over the years,” Mr Hedge said, “but this one was very fleeting, and a bit of a fizzer. They occur every year or so, but are fairly unpredictable in their behaviour”.
The name ATLAS is the acronym for its discoverer, Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, a robotic telescope array that discovers large inbound objects which, if they hit the Earth, could be catastrophic. We would get up to two months notice if something like an asteroid the size of a car or bigger was heading towards Earth, and NASA would be able to launch devices to deflect it before collision. At least that’s the theory.
The two streaks of light in the mid-left and top right are the paths of two of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink satellites. Astronomers and night photographers are concerned about the ever-increasing pollution of these unwanted lines during their exposures. Starlink is ultimately aiming to have up to 42,000 satellites in orbit.
For the photographers: Olympus E-M1 camera, 75mm lens, ISO 1600, exposure 4 seconds at f2, camera on a tripod.
