cometary organics

Comet 96P/Machholz has emerged into the predawn sky following its perihelion passage earlier this week. Here it was this morning from Pasadena, at ~2 degrees above the horizon and ~14 degrees from the Sun, with a hint of the first ~5' of its dust tail. Very rough photometry gives a coma r' magnitude of ~7. Observing conditions will rapidly improve over the next week as the comet fades.

Here's comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) from last week, which looks fairly similar to (albeit brighter than) the view through the eyepiece under light polluted Pasadena skies last night. It's actually not that green of a comet, with its coma brightness being overwhelmingly from dust rather than gas.

Comet 96P/Machholz has just reached its perihelion, at only 0.12 au from the Sun. Here's the view from the SOHO spacecraft's LASCO C3 coronagraph, which has been running a special program observing the comet through several color filters over the last couple days.

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