Bright comet quite visible at Easter, with a bit of luck

From Easter weekend, once the moon is no longer troubling, it can be “barely visible in the dark sky,” explains comet expert and chairman of the Martinsberg Astronomical Center (Lower Austria), Michael Jäger. “I haven’t seen it with the naked eye yet, but the weather here was very bad,” says Jäger, who discovered the comet “290P/Jäger” in 1998.

Comet can shine brightly
12 P/Pons-Brooks tends to have bursts of clarity. Bigger jumps in brightness were observed when the comet returned in the 19th and 20th centuries, Jäger explains. What was remarkable was that this illumination occurred long before the comet had reached its closest point to the Sun (perihelion); “the closer it got to the sun, the smaller the bursts of brightness were.”

The comet reaches its closest point to the sun on April 21. Due to its steeply inclined orbit, Central Europe is only visible before perihelion, reports Alexander Pikhard of the Vienna Working Group for Astronomy (WAA).

The peel around the core shimmers green
Jäger recommends that anyone interested look for the comet in the “short window of about 90 minutes after sunset.” The tail star is low on the horizon in a west-northwest direction, “but it’s still high enough and it’s dark enough already.” It wouldn’t hurt to at least have a pair of binoculars to get a better look at the comet with its green glowing coma, the diffusely glowing envelope surrounding the nucleus. It is slowly starting to develop a dust tail, “which is good because we can see it better at night with the human eye than the previously dominant blue ion tail,” says Jäger.

Discovered in July 1812
Comet 12 P/Pons-Brooks orbits the Sun in a long elliptical orbit once every 71.3 years. The celestial body was discovered in July 1812 by Jean-Louis Pons of the Marseille Observatory and rediscovered in 1883 by William R. Brooks after an orbital perturbation. With its orbit around the sun, its orbit is comparable to that of the well-known comet 1P/Halley, according to WAA boss Pikhard.

Comet is the size of Vienna
According to Jäger, 12 P/Pons-Brooks is one of the largest periodic comets, together with Halley’s comet. While the core of 1P/Halley measures about 15 kilometers, that of 12 P/Pons-Brooks is about twice as large at 30 kilometers – and is approximately the diameter of the federal capital Vienna.