Ancient Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas over Canary Islands

Ancient Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas over Canary Islands

Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas is now headed back to the outer Solar System. The massive dusty snowball put on quite a show during its trip near the Sun, resulting in many impressive pictures from planet Earth during October 2024. This image of Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS was captured by Gergely Tóth from La Palma, Canary Islands, October 1, 2024 at 06:00 UTC.

 

The Canary Islands, also known informally as the Canaries, are a Spanish region, autonomous community and archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean. At their closest point to the African mainland, they are 100 kilometers (62 miles) west of Morocco and the Western Sahara. La Palma, also known as La isla bonita and historically San Miguel de La Palma, is the most northwesterly island of the Canary Islands, Spain.

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.

Although this comet is very old, it was just discovered in 2023, when it approached the inner solar system on its highly elliptical orbit for the first time in documented human history. Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas hails from the Oort Cloud that scientists think is a giant spherical shell surrounding our solar system. It is like a big, thick-walled bubble made of icy pieces of space debris the sizes of mountains and sometimes larger. The Oort Cloud lies far beyond Pluto and the most distant edges of the Kuiper Belt and may contain billions, or even trillions, of objects.

Image Credit & Copyright: Gergely Tóth

Image Date: Oct. 1, 2024

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