Comet (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) over Austria

Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) over Austria

Astrophotographer Michael Karrer: "Last scene of this beautiful comet."

Astrophotographer Michael Karrer: "The tail becomes clearer as dusk fades. Photographically 12 degrees long, with the naked eye approx. 5 degrees. A magnificent sight! The anti-tail is faintly visible."

Astrophotographer Michael Karrer: "The comet in early twilight. Cirrus clouds gave a nice touch, even if we had to worry about them hiding the comet at some time."

Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. Austria is bordered by Germany to the northwest, the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia to the northeast, Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west.

C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) is a comet from the solar system's Oort cloud discovered by the Purple Mountain Observatory east of Nanjing, China, on January 9, 2023, and independently found by the automated Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in South Africa on February 22, 2023. ATLAS is funded by NASA's planetary defense office, and developed and operated by the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy. C/2023 A3 passed perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) at a distance of 0.39 AU (58 million km; 36 million miles) on September 27, 2024.

The Oort cloud is theorized to be a vast cloud of icy planetesimals surrounding the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 AU (0.03 to 3.2 light-years). The concept of such a cloud was proposed in 1950 by the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, in whose honor the idea was named. Oort proposed that the bodies in this cloud replenish and keep constant the number of long-period comets entering the inner Solar System—where they are eventually consumed and destroyed during close approaches to the Sun.

Image Credit: Michael Karrer

Capture Date: October 14, 2024

Release Date: October 25, 2024

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