In case you haven’t heard, which I’m sure many of you have, there’s a promising comet on the way. By promising, I mean it may be bright and bright enough to see with the naked eye, especially in the dark skies of the countryside. It may even be easily visible to stargazers from urban and suburban light-polluted locations.
It may have a relatively sizable tail of dust and gas. Presently, the comet is roughly in a line between the Earth and the sun, lost in the glare of our home star. But starting next weekend, look for it in the very low western sky during the later part of evening twilight.
It might be really tough to spot then, but as October continues, Tsuchinshan-Atlas will start evenings a little higher in the west. I’ll have much more next week on the partially melting cosmic dirty snow and ice ball paying us a visit. Meanwhile, I have a pleasant celestial challenge for you, the long and winding Draco the Dragon.
It’s not the easiest of constellations to find, but once you do, you feel like you’ve accomplished something. It always reminds me of one of the great Beatles classics, “The Long and Winding Road,” because that is what it truly is in the northwestern October sky. It’s undoubtedly one of the larger constellations in the heavens, but the difficulty locating it is that most of Draco’s stars aren’t all that bright.
The best way to find Draco is to visualize it more as a coiled snake than a dragon as if we know what dragons look like anyway! Acc.