Today’s #STEMvee spotlights our favorite Comet NEOWISE! The comet is closest to Earth today on July 23! Watch to learn a bit more about the comet and where to see it in the sky!
Special thanks to Jake Norris for providing us with a script!
[Video Description: Barbara, a white woman with curly red hair, is wearing a navy blue long sleeved sweater with feathered earrings. She is sitting on concrete steps with a green bush in the background.]
Transcript: You may have seen news about an exciting, newly discovered, comet that is visible in the Northern Hemisphere. Traveling at around 144,000 mph, the Comet NEOWISE is currently orbiting the sun at a distance of about 70 million miles away from Earth. The comet was discovered very recently, on March 27, 2020, by the NASA mission “Near-Earth Object Wide-field Survey Explorer”, or NEOWISE. The comet, technically named C/2020 F3, is commonly referred to as the comet NEOWISE, from the namesake of the mission that discovered it, is still visible in the morning and evening northern sky. What are comets? Comets are “cosmic snowballs” made up of frozen gases and dust, leftovers from the formation of our solar system. As comets approach the sun in their orbit, they heat up and spew gases and dust causing some comet heads to grow larger than a planet and tails to stretch millions of miles long! The Neowise comet is about 3 miles in diameter and has two tails, typical for an average comet in our solar system. It is also estimated that there is about an equivalence of 13 million Olympic swimming pools worth of water on the comet, or slightly more than the amount of water in Lake Champlain! Earlier this month, the comet came closest to the sun on July 3rd. The comet, during this time, was only visible during the early morning hours, before dawn. The comet has become higher in the evening sky and, with ideal conditions, is observable by the naked eye below the constellation Ursa Major, the constellation that also contains the constellation known as the Big Dipper. Most people, however, will need some optical assistance, simple binoculars or a low powered telescope will do just the trick!
