That’s a lot of things in a single picture!
Even though you can see many galaxies and stars in the picture, which includes the well known gravitationally interacting M81 and M82 (at lower right), the hero we mustn’t be missing is the comet ATLAS C/2019 Y4, discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (yeah, ATLAS gets its name from it) which was the last comet discovery reported in 2019.
But where is the hero??
Did you notice the greenish coma on the upper left side of the image, yeah.. that is our hero, Comet Atlas.
Visible through a telescope as a diffuse object in the camelopardalis constellation, this comet will be closest to earth on May 23rd. Let’s hope that it doesn’t disintegrate before that.
– Archana
Credits: NASA
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