‘Christmas Comet’ Will Shimmer Through Night Sky into 2022

The half-mile-wide Comet Leonard has been a nightly spectacle in the lead-up to Christmas and will continue to dash through the night sky into the New Year.

The “Christmas comet,” made of space dust, ice, and rock, reached its closest proximity to earth on December 12 and will become dimmer and dimmer into the final days of the year, according to Accuweather.

“Based on how bright comet Leonard has been appearing recently, it looks like it will not be as bright as last year’s comet NEOWISE,” said Program Executive at NASA Headquarters Gordon Johnston, per Accuweather. 

“This comet should be visible with a backyard telescope or binoculars and may be visible to the naked eye under very clear and dark observing conditions,” Johnston added. 

Those wishing to see the spectacle should use venus as a reference point, Accuweather reports. The comet is to the left of the plant.

“Viewers will need a clear view of the horizon, as the comet will only be a few degrees above the horizon as evening twilight ends,” Johnston stated. 

The comet “will look like a fuzzy green star with a small tail,” even when using binoculars or a telescope, Accuweather reported. 

Comet Leonard, officially named C/2021 A1, will make its closest pass to the sun on January 3 at 56 million miles away, NASA reports. The comet will disintegrate or carry on into interstellar space, never to return. 

The Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI), a spacecraft of both the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA, captured animated images of the comet streaking through space with the Milky Way as a backdrop. The images were recorded between December 17-19.  

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Astronomer Gregory Leonard of the University of Arizona discovered the celestial object in January of 2021 at Mt. Lemmon Observatory in Arizona, according to NASA. 

“I discovered Comet C/2021 A1 Leonard — also known to the world as Comet Leonard — on the morning of Jan. 3, 2021,” Leonard told Space.com. “It was a serendipitous, or incidental, discovery in one of our standard survey fields, looking for near-Earth asteroids.”

“We do occasionally stumble into unknown comets, and that’s exactly what Comet Leonard was,” the astronomer added.