Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS

This is seriously off topic, but there was good viewing of comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS about an hour after local sunset here in Rhode Island tonight.  It was fairly easy to find using a smartphone camera, but I had to wait a bit longer to see it with my naked eye.  The full moon rising, even though on the other side of the sky, was so bright that it eventually washed out the comet.

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS gets its name from the facilities that first spotted it back in 2023: the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Tsuchinshan means Purple Mountain) and the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS).

Photo taken at 7:04 PM local time (23:04 UTC) looking almost due west from Exeter RI

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