We will see a rare visitor from the edge of the solar system in the sky in January and February 2023, comet 2022 E3 (ZTF). It was discovered at the beginning of 2022 and is now greeting us on its 50,000-year journey through our solar system. The comet theoretically reaches a brightness at the beginning of February that makes it visible as a faint nebula with good binoculars. It is then closest to us at 42 million kilometres and returns to the edge of the solar system. However, the bright light of the full moon obscures its rather faint but long gas tail and its diffuse dust tail. The comet has an unusual trajectory, travelling almost perpendicular to the ecliptic, a plane in which the Earth orbits the Sun and roughly all the planets. And it orbits the sun clockwise, while the planets orbit the sun anti-clockwise.

Comet 2022 E3 (ZTF)

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