The heavens are aligning to give Marylanders a rare look at a naked-eye comet as Lulin swings by en route to what could be a million-year exile in the far reaches of the solar system.
Comet Lulin is the first comet visible from Maryland with the naked eye since Comet Holmes appeared in October and November 2007. You can see it already, but the view will be even better when it passes within 38 million miles of Earth on Monday evening, its closest approach since rounding the sun in January.
It might be making its very first visit to the inner solar system, scientists say. At the very least, it is on a path that brings it back into the sun's heat and turbulent solar winds only once in tens of thousands or even millions of years.
Amateur stargazers and scientific observatories around the world are already watching through telescopes and binoculars as the eerie green object brightens with each passing night.
"It's a fairly easy binocular sight now," said Frank Reddy, an astronomy science writer at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center who spotted it early Monday morning from a parking lot near his home in Greenbelt. He described it as a "hazy ball. ... It was fairly easy to pick out."
It might be more difficult to spot amid urban lighting. But the Maryland Science Center and other local public observatories are preparing to help visitors find the comet during scheduled observation sessions starting this evening, weather permitting. Baltimore's "Streetcorner Astronomer," Herman Heyn, said he would be looking with his telescope Sunday evening, from the 3100 block of St. Paul St. in Charles Village.
Under clear, dark skies, Lulin should be visible for most of the night Monday. The best time to look will be in the late evening, after 11 p.m.
Comet Lulin was first photographed two years ago by Chi Sheng Lin, an astronomer at the Lulin Observatory in Taiwan. But it wasn't discovered in those images until July 2007, when Quanzhi Ye, a 19-year-old meteorology student at mainland China's Sun Yat-sen University, found it on the Lulin photos.
The Chinese and Taiwanese are calling it the "comet of collaboration."
Astronomers around the world quickly zeroed in on the new object. They calculated its orbit and concluded it originated in the Oort Cloud, an icy region far beyond the orbits of the outermost planets.
