It’s an interstellar double header.
Monday’s solar eclipse isn’t the only once-in-a-lifetime celestial event on the horizon. An explosive comet called the “Mother of Dragons” will be appearing after dusk for the next few weeks in the Northern Hemisphere, giving stargazers plenty of time to catch a glimpse.
“The comet will brighten a bit as it gets closer to the sun, and it should be visible to the naked eye low in the west [each evening] about an hour after sunset,” Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, and Davide Farnocchia, a NASA navigation engineer told CNN in a joint email.
Dubbed Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, this cosmic hailstone only orbits the sun once every 71 years, with its last solar circumnavigation occurring in 1954.
This particular body is a cryovolcano, which erupts when a large amount of gas and ice amasses and combusts like frozen Coke can.
During prior eruptions, the arctic blast caused the coma — the cloud of gas at the comet’s center — to sprout “horns” like some sort of intergalactic Beezlebub, earning 12P the moniker “Devil Comet.”
As the appendages have been absent during recent viewings, astronomers have since renamed 12P the “Mother Of Dragons,” because it’s thought to have spawned the annual “kappa-Draconids” meteor shower.
The best time to witness the comet — which is three times the size of Mount Everest — will be on April 21, when it will reach its closest point to the Sun.
The “Mother Of Dragons” will be nearest to Earth in June, but will only be visible in the Southern Hemisphere, meaning early April is Northerners’ best bet to get a glimpse.
To witness the iceball cometh, stargazers should camp out in an unpopulated area with a good west-facing view an hour after sunset, when the intergalactic ice cube will be most visible.
“You should go to a location away from city lights and with an unobstructed view of the western horizon,” according to Chodas and Farnocchia. “It would be advisable to use a pair of binoculars, since the comet may be hard to locate without them.”
Interestingly, 12P will also be visible on April 8 at the same time as the eclipse, however astronomers advise against letting this “overshadow” the much-awaited cosmic overlap.
“The comet should be fairly easy to find during the total solar eclipse, as well as a number of planets, but the main focus during those 4 minutes should be on the eclipse itself!” declared Chodas and Farnocchia.