Comet 17/P Holmes starting to light up the sky

There’s a comet that’s starting to sparkle the night sky: Comet 17/P Holmes. It is said to look quite nice with binoculars or a small telescope, but is also visible with the naked eye.

NASA has a great 2D model of the comet’s orbit. (You’ll need Java, but almost all computers these days have it installed.)

I’ll post more soon, but if you have Stellarium (a great open-source planetarium program), you can add it to your ssystem.ini file by entering the following information:

[17P/Holmes]
name = 17P/Holmes
parent = Sun
radius = 1200
oblateness = 0.0
albedo = 1.0
lighting = true
sidereal_period = 2513.00981
halo = true
color = 1.0,1.0,1.0
tex_halo = star16x16.png
tex_map = nomap.png
coord_func = comet_orbit
orbit_Epoch = 2454221.5
orbit_MeanAnomaly = 359.49863
orbit_SemiMajorAxis = 3.6174053
orbit_Eccentricity = 0.4324195
orbit_ArgOfPericenter = 24.25862
orbit_AscendingNode = 326.86739
orbit_Inclination = 19.11331

Thanks to the great posters at SourceForge for this information.

Once you enter it in your program, you can see exactly when and where Comet 17/P Holmes will be visible at your location.