A Bright New Comet Inbound to the Inner Solar System

• nemesis maturity Published on Nov 13, 2018
  AMATEUR ASTRONOMERS FIND A BRIGHT NEW COMET: There’s a new comet in the morning sky. Discovered just last week by three amateur astronomers–one in Arizona and two in Japan–Comet Machholz-Fujikawa-Iwamoto (C/2018 V1) has quadrupled in brightness over the past few days. “It is now glowing like a fuzzy 8th magnitude star in the constellation Virgo,” reports Michael Jäger of Turmkogel, Austria, who photographed it on Nov. 11th. “The discovery of a comet by amateur astronomers is a rare event nowadays because robotic Near-Earth-Object search programs usually catch them first,” he says. “My special congratulations to the three discoverers.” Comet Machholz-Fujikawa-Iwamoto appears to be a first-time visitor to the inner solar system. It is plunging toward the sun on nearly-parabolic orbit that will take it just inside the orbit of Mercury. Closest approach to the sun (0.38 AU) is on Dec. 3-4; closest approach to Earth (0.67 AU) is Nov. 27th. Read more here:
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  http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?v…
  http://spaceweather.com/
  https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astro…
  https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sst…
  https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi…
  https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/mpe…

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