SOHO Observations of Comet SWAN (IMAGE)
Caption
In late May and early June, Earthlings may be able to glimpse Comet SWAN. The comet is currently faintly visible to the unaided eye in the Southern Hemisphere just before sunrise -- providing skywatchers with a relatively rare glimpse of a comet bright enough to be seen without a telescope. But Comet SWAN's initial discovery was made not from the ground, but via an instrument on board ESA (the European Space Agency) and NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, satellite. The new comet was first spotted in April 2020, by an amateur astronomer named Michael Mattiazzo using data from a SOHO instrument called Solar Wind Anisotropies, or SWAN -- as seen here. The comet appears to leave the left side of the image and reappear on the right side around May 3, because of the way SWAN's 360-degree all-sky maps are shown, much like a globe is represented by a 2D map.
Credit
ESA/NASA/SOHO
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