On January 9th, 2023, China’s Purple Mountain Observatory discovered a comet from the Oort Cloud. They wanted to know more about it, but they unfortunately were unable to find it again. One month later, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Africa spotted it again on the 22nd of February. This comet became known as C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS).
As news got out about the comet, most people didn’t really care because comets usually aren’t visible without a telescope. But as the month of October was coming, scientists revealed that C/2023 A3 could be visible to the naked eye. During October, the news and social media were all over it. On October 12th, many people rushed somewhere to get a chance to witness the spectacle. The reason it was the 12th was because that was the peak brightness of the comet. It reached an apparent magnitude of 0.4, easily visible to the naked eye and brighter than comet NEOWISE in 2020. People even gave C/2023 A3 the nickname of “The Great Comet of 2024”!
I went to see it on October 12th in New York City. I could just barely see it with my eyes. But when I used my phone to take a picture, it came out beautiful. Were you lucky enough to see it?