Comet Lulin!

There's a new comet out in the night sky, called Comet Lulin, although Paolo Candy (who took the photo shown here) called it the "Sword Comet" for obvious reasons. The comet has two tails pointing in opposite directions.

Generally comets have two tails: one is a narrow ion tail, pointing away from the sun, "blown" (magnetically) by the solar wind. The other tail is a dust tail, which is dust that is left behind by the comet when the ice binding it to the comet sublimates. This dust forms a wide stream of particles left behind in the comet's orbital path.

With most comets we see the dust tail as a wide curved tail, but with Comet Lulin we see a thin straight dust tail pointing toward the lower left of the image. Why? Because comet Lulin's orbital plane is almost exactly the same as the orbital plane of the Earth (and other planets). Imagine cutting a wide curved comet tail out of a sheet of paper and then looking at the paper edge-on -- looks thin and straight!

Comet Lulin will be passing about 2^o south of Saturn tonight, then perhaps hitting peak brightness tomorrow night, and will be in opposition (opposite the Sun from Earth's point of view) the next night.

Even though Comet Lulin is near its peak brightness, it is only about 5th magnitude. At that brightness, you won't be able to see it with the naked eye unless you have a very dark country sky. If you can make out all four stars in the bowl of the Little Dipper, you may be able to see the comet naked-eye. If you don't have very dark skies (and maybe even if you do), your best bet is probably binoculars, but you have to find it first. This site has a nice image showing the position of the comet in relation to the horizon and Saturn (which is too bright to miss) on various days through March 1. The site also has more images and more information for you to enjoy!