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Comet discovered last year to make closest approach to Earth on February 1

It will be seen with a naked eye on a dark sky with no city lights

© Yegor Aleyev/TASS

MOSCOW, February 1. /TASS/. Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF), discovered last March, will make its closest approach to the Earth on February 1, the press service of the Moscow Planetarium told TASS on Wednesday.

"It will be seen with a naked eye on a dark sky with no city lights. Visibility will be perfect for Russia and all countries of the northern hemisphere - the comet’s path on the night sky will lie straight between the ‘dipper’ of Ursa Major and Polaris," the planetarium said.

The comet’s name - C/2022 E3 (ZTF) - stands for Zwicky transient facility, a wide-field sky astronomical survey device that helped to detect the previously unknown object on March 2, 2022.

Even at the moment of its closest approach, the comet will be 100 times farther from the Earth than the Moon, separated from our planet by 42 million kilometers. Astronomers suggest that its brightness will be of magnitude +5 or +4, and the size of its gas tail will exceed 10 degrees - the size of the ‘dipper’ of Ursa Major.

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