Scope A Bright Green Comet with Your Own Eyes Later this Month

I'm just the right age to possibly see Halley's Comet twice.

When I was in 6th grade, Halley's comet was all the rage because it was sort of like the Old Faithful of comets. It seems to come around like clockwork every 70-ish years. Since I was old enough to know what everyone was talking about, but young enough to see it twice, I immediately thought myself to be pretty cool. Obviously, I grew up to realize that never ended up being the case, haha.

But I did make sure to catch a glimpse of the legendary comet as it passed us by. A little over a year ago, we had the super rare event of a comet passing through our solar system that would never be seen again, and hadn't passed through here in over 70,000 years. That was pretty cool.

This month, Mainers will hopefully get to see a comet known as C/2022 E3.

According to NPR, C/2022 E3 will begin its journey through our space a bit later this month. It should be pretty easy to spot, weather permitting, with it's bright green center, and a long tail trailing off behind it. I remember Halley's just looking like kind of a pale white trail in the sky, not looking particularly special.

But what's even cool about this bright green bad boy, is that if it's ever been in our solar system before, it's never once been recorded. So it's either completely new to this area, or it hasn't been here in thousands of years. That certainly ups the ante to make you want to set aside some time for viewing it.

We should start to see it in the early morning sky by the end of the month, and into February. It'll be best to look toward the northwest. There's so little info about this new comet, no one knows exactly where it will go from here. Who cares? We'll have a comet to look at for a little bit!