A bright comet is lighting up Central Coast skies. Here’s how you can spot it

The only comet that I remember seeing with the naked eye in my life was the Hale-Bopp comet, which increased in brightness and developed two tails, one blue and the other yellow, as it approached the sun in early 1997.

When it passed perihelion, the point nearest to the sun, on April 1, 1997, it was a spectacular sight.

That night, the moon was a waning crescent phase, and Hale-Bopp was the brightest object in the night sky, except for Sirius, the dog star. Hale-Bopp’s tail stretched nearly 45 degrees across the sky.

Stargazing sometimes can seem a little uneventful without a telescope. It takes a lot of patience to view tiny bits and fragments from the Swift-Tuttle comet that slam into our atmosphere and create the Perseid meteor showers.

For the second time in my life, another comet that can be seen without binoculars or a telescope appeared to skywatchers earlier this month before sunrise.

The comet is named NEOWISE after NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft that first discovered it on March 27 coming from a dark part of the night sky.

According to NASA, the NEOWISE comet has “a nucleus measuring roughly three miles in diameter. Its dust and ion tails stretch hundreds of thousands to millions of miles while pointing away from the sun.

“Comets are made of frozen leftovers from the formation of the solar system roughly 4.6 billion years ago. The masses of dust, rock, and ice heat up when approaching the sun; they spew gases and dust into a glowing head and tail as they get closer.”

NASA reported that the NEOWISE comet passed perihelion with the sun on July 3, when it swung inside Mercury’s orbit. It’s the brightest comet in 23 years.

This week, the NEOWISE comet can now be seen around one hour after sunset in the northwestern heavens below the Big Dipper constellation, hanging straight down by its handle.

Like the time I saw Hale-Bopp, the moon is in a waning crescent phase this week and will not rise until the early morning, which will keep the sky dark. However, Central Coast stargazers will need to get above the 1,500-foot-deep marine layer with its coastal stratus clouds and far away from urban lights.

The NEOWISE comet will be closest to Earth on Wednesday and Thursday, when it will be 64 million miles away as it crosses our planet’s orbit.

Every evening until then, the comet is forecast to get dimmer. However, it will also be higher in the heavens up as twilight ends.

After Thursday, it will move away from the Earth at about 17,500 mph, and it will start to fade away like a ship sailing out to sea, not to appear again for another 6,800 years.

To take a photo of this comet, I would recommend mounting your camera on a tripod.

Use the (M) manual setting on your digital SLR and set your ASA to around 600. Use the lowest f-stop setting possible, such as 1.4 or 2.8, since depth-of-field is not a factor and experiment with the shutter speed. I’ve had the best results using between 2 to 6 seconds.

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