The Milky Way acts as a proscenium arch for the zodiac light and the tsuchinshan-atlas comet in this panorama taken on October 19 near Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes. The photographer used a Canon 6da DSLR and a 20 mm f/1.4 lens to take twelve frames of 8 seconds to ISO 1600. Credit: Lucas Thibaud
The comets are notoriously unpredictable. Some of the most spectacular of these frozen visitors appear unexpectedly, cprovinging themselves towards the sun and discovering in a spectacular way with little notice. Others are spotted more than a year before making their closest approach, but break and escape.
The tsuchinshan-atlas comet was the rare comet that came with a year and a half of fanfare and lived to the Hype, serving views of naked eyes for weeks. If it was not a great comet, it was at least very, very good.
Formally known as C/2023 A3, this ice ball of the external solar system was discovered for the first time in the images taken on January 9, 2023, by a telescope managed by Purple Mountain Observatory near Nanchino in the province of Jiangsu in China. A month and a half later, it was identified by a telescope in South Africa belonging to the last alert system (Atlas). These observations put the object to 670 million miles (1.1 billion kilometers) from the sun, between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn.
He would not have reached Perdielio – his closest point to the sun – until September 27, 2024. But immediately, the gears of the Hype machine started shooting.
Initially, it seemed that the best views could end up being exclusive of the southern hemisphere. The comet became visible for the first time in southern sky sky and remained low in the northern sky while reaching Perdie. Shortly after, he moved in conjunction with the sun and was lost in the glow of our star. But the best views still had to arrive: the comet has been re -emerged as an evening object by an easy naked eye in the same period in which he made his approach closest to the Earth on October 12th. At its peak, it was recorded as the magnitude –4.9, the brightest in the northern hemisphere since 1997 Hale Bopp (c/1995 o1). Tsuchinshan-Atlas also showed off an extraordinary tail that extends up to 15 ° in the photographs, as well as a clear anti-coda tail.
The comets are what they are, there is no indication when such a bright one will oscillate to others. Until then, we have these images to savor.
What’s in a name?
The tsuchinshan-atlas comet owes its name to two observers who discovered it independently. The first, Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO), was founded in 1934 and is considered the first modern Astronomical Observatory of China. The name Tsuchinshan – traditionally used for the comets discovered by Pmo – is an old transliteration of Zijinshan, which is Chinese for “Purple Mountain”. The historical position of the Observatory is on top of a mountain in the heart of Nanjing, a city of almost 10 million people.
The Code of the Minor Planet Center for the Observatory is Nanking: the historical transliteration of Nanjing. But most of the PMO research is now conducted in various satellite observers in more remote sites. The telescope that detected for the first time the comet C/2023 A3 is a 1.2 meter Schmidt located in the County of Xuyi, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north-west of the original Pmo site. The Xuyi station reported three objects of the object for one night, but was subsequently presumably lost.
The latest asteroid alert system (Atlas) is a network of four telescopes managed by the University of Hawai’i and financed by NASA which scans the whole sky in search of asteroids that could threaten the earth. Two areas of Atlas are in Hawaii, one is in Chile and one is in South Africa. The latter-one Schmidt of 0.5 meters at the South African Astronomical Observatory of Sutherland-is the one that pointed out independently the comet c/2023 A3, on February 22, 2023. The subsequent analyzes revealed that it was the same object discovered by PMO.
