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04/23/2020 – Ephemeris – New Comet SWAN
This is Ephemeris for Thursday, April 23rd. Today the Sun will be up for 13 hours and 54 minutes, setting at 8:38, and it will rise tomorrow at 6:42. The Moon, 1 day past new, will set at 9:18 this evening.
Let’s get a preview of the newly discovered Comet SWAN. It was discovered using the Solar Wind Anisotropies or SWAN camera on the SOHO spacecraft hanging out a million miles (1.5 million km) sunward of the Earth. The SWAN instrument is the only one on the spacecraft not pointed at the Sun. Its to study where the solar wind interacts with the interstellar medium of hydrogen. The comet must have been producing an extraordinary amount of hydrogen to be noticed, so the comet may have had an outburst, and it may fade to its normally dim self after a while. That means it may not be naked-eye by the middle of next month. Assuming this was no outburst, the comet will make its naked-eye debut low in the northwest near the end of twilight in late May. I’ll have updates as we go.
The event times given are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
Comet C/2020 F8 (SWAN) photographed by Ariel Rodriguez, La Reja, Argentina. Click on the image to enlarge. Retrieved from Seiichi Yoshida’s web site. See link below.
Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog 