Author: Jonti Horner, Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland

In January 2023, a new comet was discovered. Comets are found regularly, but astronomers quickly realised this one, called C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS), had the potential to be quite bright. Some hyperbolic reports have suggested it might be the “comet of the century”, but any astronomer will tell you the brightness of comets is notoriously hard to predict. As I explained last year, we’d have to wait until it arrived to be sure how bright it would become. Now, the time has come. Comet C/2023 A3 is currently visible with the naked eye in the morning sky in Australia and Aotearoa…