Comet 46P/Wirtanen is a short-period comet with an orbit of more than five years, so most of the time it is not very bright; this year, however, it came especially close to Earth and as such attained a brightness of about magnitude +3.9, making it easily a naked-eye object. Its path through our sky brought it from the area of Fornax northeastward to Taurus and then Auriga. On this evening, the comet is near the star Eta Eridani. Unannotated image. |
Hover over the above thumbnail to see the portion of sky shown with north up. |