What’s better than the near approach of a comet? How about the near approach of two comets? That’s what we’re expecting during the month of May, 2020! Comet C/2019 Y4, also known as Comet ATLAS, was discovered late last December. It will come closest to Earth on May 23rd, at a distance of about 72 […]

Header Image: While C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) is too far away for us to get detailed images, it probably looks something like this image taken on March 27, 2016, by the Rosetta spacecraft, 329 km from the nucleus of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The image measures 28.7 km across. Image Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NavCam The Day the Adler Met an […]

Have you ever seen a comet in the night sky? I suspect most of the people reading this haven’t. It’s not that there aren’t a lot of comets in the Solar System—more than 5,000 have been discovered so far and several dozen can be spotted using very large telescopes each year—but because most comets are […]