It’s an interstellar double header.
Monday’s solar eclipse isn’t the one once-in-a-lifetime celestial event on the horizon. An explosive comet called the “Mother of Dragons” can be appearing after dusk for the following few weeks within the Northern Hemisphere, giving stargazers loads of time to catch a glimpse.
“The comet will brighten a bit because it gets closer to the sun, and it needs to be visible to the naked eye low within the west [each evening] about an hour after sunset,” Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, and Davide Farnocchia, a NASA navigation engineer told CNN in a joint email.
Dubbed Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, this cosmic hailstone only orbits the sun once every 71 years, with its last solar circumnavigation occurring in 1954.
This particular body is a cryovolcano, which erupts when a considerable amount of gas and ice amasses and combusts like frozen Coke can.
During prior eruptions, the arctic blast caused the coma — the cloud of gas on the comet’s center — to sprout “horns” like some type of intergalactic Beezlebub, earning 12P the moniker “Devil Comet.”
Because the appendages have been absent during recent viewings, astronomers have since renamed 12P the “Mother Of Dragons,” since it’s thought to have spawned the annual “kappa-Draconids” meteor shower.
The most effective time to witness the comet — which is 3 times the scale of Mount Everest — can be on April 21, when it would reach its closest point to the Sun.
The “Mother Of Dragons” can be nearest to Earth in June, but will only be visible within the Southern Hemisphere, meaning early April is Northerners’ best bet to get a glimpse.
To witness the iceball cometh, stargazers should camp out in an unpopulated area with a great west-facing view an hour after sunset, when the intergalactic ice cube can be most visible.
“It’s best to go to a location away from city lights and with an unobstructed view of the western horizon,” in keeping with Chodas and Farnocchia. “It will be advisable to make use of a pair of binoculars, for the reason that comet could also be hard to locate without them.”
Interestingly, 12P can even be visible on April 8 similtaneously the eclipse, nonetheless astronomers advise against letting this “overshadow” the much-awaited cosmic overlap.
“The comet needs to be fairly easy to seek out throughout the total solar eclipse, in addition to a variety of planets, however the important focus during those 4 minutes needs to be on the eclipse itself!” declared Chodas and Farnocchia.
