Comet 46p/Wirtanen Time Lapse December 16 2018

This is Comet 46p/Wirtanen as seen from Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh, NC on December 16 2018 at 10pm. This time lapse was filmed over a 1 hour period with long exposure photos shot in an interval.

From Space.com:

The comet will make its closest approach on Sunday (Dec. 16), flying by just 7,199,427 miles (11,586,350 kilometers) from our planet. That's about 30 times the distance to the moon. It sounds far away, but in celestial terms, this is a close flyby — among the 10 closest cometary approaches since 1950, according to Space.com skywatching columnist Joe Rao. If you're worried about dangerous comets striking Earth, however, breathe easy: Wirtanen is not on the list of those that astronomers worry about. [Amazing Photos: Brilliant Comet 46P/Wirtanen Wows Stargazers]

"This will be the closest comet Wirtanen has come to Earth for centuries and the closest it will come to Earth for centuries," Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "This could be one of the brightest comets in years, offering astronomers an important opportunity to study a comet up close with ground-based telescopes, both optical and radar."

Right now, Australian National University astronomer Brad Tucker told Space.com, Wirtanen is "hanging out near the constellation Orion," which, luckily, is an easy find for even a beginning astronomer. Orion is a bright wintertime constellation that you can spot in the eastern sky by the distinctive "Orion's Belt," a band of three stars.

If you hold your fist to the sky and look a couple of fist-lengths to the right of the belt, you will spot Wirtanen. This article by Rao gives you more details about where to look, depending on when you are able to go outside for the show.

Wirtanen's unusual composition (it includes methane and carbon), as well as its close orbit to the sun, made it the original target for the European Space Agency Rosetta mission. However, Rosetta's target was changed to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which the probe studied for roughly two years, between 2014 and 2016.

Wirtanen is one of three comets that astronomer Carl Wirtanen discovered in 1948. It makes flybys of Earth every 5.4 years, cycling in a short orbit that makes it a part of the Jupiter-class family of comets. (By contrast, comets from the distant Oort Cloud, located past Neptune, may have orbital periods spanning decades, or even hundreds or thousands of years.)

These constant swings by the sun come with a cost. Wirtanen is largely made up of ices, and with the comet's repeated passes by our star, that ice has bled off over the eons — eliminating any hope of a bright tail caused by lots of material released at once, Tucker said. Also, Wirtanen has a small nucleus. The Hubble Space Telescope examined Wirtanen in 1996 and found a tiny core of only seven-tenths of a mile (1.1 km), one of the smallest cometary nuclei we know of.

Видео Comet 46p/Wirtanen Time Lapse December 16 2018 канала Jon Warlick