It is further away than the sun – but you can still see it in the darkness: the comet occurs about every 70 years 12 P/Pons Brooks as currently back on its orbit for some time to be seen from Earth. According to amateur astronomer Michael Jäger, with a little luck you can even spot it with the naked eye, for example from a mountain.
“The comet is prone to bursts of brightness,” says Jäger, who photographed the celestial body from Austria in March. There are a kind of geysers on the surface that spew out gas and dust, creating the typical shimmering greenish-yellow tail.
“Overall, you can observe the comet well, but you need binoculars,” says Uwe Pilz, chairman of the Association of Star Friends based in Bensheim in southern Hesse. “The comet is quite low in the evening sky.” To see it, you have to look northwest in the evening. You should start observing when twilight is well advanced but the sky is not yet completely dark, says Pilz. “Depending on the location in the German-speaking area, this is between 7.30 p.m. and 8 p.m..” Beginners would have a good chance of finding it by early April, weather permitting. For astronomers it ends on April 10th.
The comet, which is probably around 30 kilometers in size, is around 240 million kilometers from our home planet and therefore further away than the center of the solar system. The coma – a foggy shell around the comet’s nucleus – and the tail arise when such celestial bodies come close to the sun during their orbit and heat up. At 12 P/Pons Brooks Jäger estimates that the tail is “certainly over ten million kilometers long.” It could be described as the big brother of Halley’s Comet.
The comet was discovered in July 1812 by Jean-Louis Pons at the Marseille Observatory and rediscovered in 1883 by William Robert Brooks. According to Jäger, it had been seen and documented in the sky hundreds of years before.
Comets come from the outermost, cold edge of the solar system and are celestial bodies that were not consumed during planet formation. According to the German Aerospace Center, they exist from dust grains, organic molecules and, because of their low temperature, from frozen gases. The high proportion of volatile matter distinguishes them from asteroids. Gravity or collisions sometimes push them out of their original orbit and then end up near the sun or Earth.