Spot Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS over Italian Village of Vitorchiano

Spot Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS over Italian Village of Vitorchiano

Featured here is a photo of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS as observed on the morning of September 30, 2024, over the Borgo sospeso of Vitorchiano. The waning crescent Moon is at upper left. Because of its weekly hyperbolic orbit, it is not known if Tsuchinshan-ATLAS will be ejected from our solar system and never be seen again. In late September, near perihelion (September 27), it became a naked eye object for the first time. Note that its closest approach to the Earth occurred on October 12, 2024.

Image Details: HDR of 5 shots with times from 1/25 of a second to 5 seconds exposure; 640 ISO; Nikon Z9 camera; Nikon Z70-200/2.8S lens; f/3.5; 100 mm focal length; taken at 06:20 local time.

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: Marco Meniero
Location: Borgo sospeso of Vitorchiano (Vt), Italy

Coordinates: 42.4704, 12.1742
Marco's Website: https://www.meniero.it
Caption Credits: Marco Meniero; Jim Foster
Image Date: Sept. 30, 2024
Release Date: Nov. 8, 2024

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