The “comet of the year” is getting brighter. In the wake of the total solar eclipse and the sudden solar “superstorms,” it’s looking more likely that we’ll also see a naked-eye comet later this year in the evening skies.
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS (C/2023 A3) is now getting brighter and growing a tail, according to Sky and Telescope.
Traveling between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, for now, comet A3 is only observable in a large telescope. It’s in the constellation Virgo.
Comets visible to the naked eye are notoriously difficult to predict in advance, but this one is expected to brighten substantially during October and possibly become as bright as Venus in the night sky. That would make it the “comet of the year”—and possibly the century.
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