How To Spot Comet 45P This Weekend

Do you want to experience a space treat this weekend? Well, just look at the sky and you will spot a zooming comet 45P that will streak past the planet Earth on the morning of Feb. 11, Saturday. The good news is that you can see it with your naked eye or a ground-based instrument such as binoculars or telescopes.

NASA stated that comet 45P passes at a distance of about 7.7 million miles (12.4 million kilometers). The relative speed of comet 45P is about 14.2 miles per second or a broken neck 51,120 mph. It is now in the early morning in the eastern sky.

Comet hunters still have a chance to see comet 45P in the next few days using binoculars or a telescope. More: https://t.co/OHiLu53bzH pic.twitter.com/akhBPHydLN

— NASA (@NASA) February 10, 2017

CBS News reports that this will be the closest approach of a comet in more than 30 years, according to Slooh, an astronomy organization. It offers a live stream of the comet's flyby this Friday at 10:30 p.m. EST. Slooh also said that binoculars and telescopes will help in the search, but at its closest approach, it might even be visible with the naked eye.

Scientists said that having observed the same comet more than once could aid the astronomers in understanding how the object changes over time. Joseph Nuth, a senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said that observing a comet multiple times over successive orbits is like taking snapshots at different stages of life. He further said that some comets have harder lives than others, depending on how close they get to the Sun. He added that they can learn about these effects by comparing different comets with varying perihelion distances over time.

Comet 45P is a short-period comet that was identified in 1948. It has an orbit that takes it around the Sun and out by Jupiter about every 5 and 1/4 years. It will pass by the planet Earth again in 2032 at almost 30 million miles (about 48 million kilometers), which will be much farther away.