My birthday celebration continues with an out of this world gift that took 50,000 years to deliver! A comet known as C/2022 E3 (ZTF) will be zipping past earth for the first time since the ice age, and was last viewed by the naked eye by Neanderthals, Woolly Mammoths and Mastodons! This is the BEST birthday gift for a renowned Dog Ufologist! Coincidence that the comet chose January 30, 2023, the date of MY birthday, to be just a mere 43 million km (27 million mi.) from our planet, and will be most visible for the next few days during my birthday week celebration? I think not! The extraterrestrials are sending me this special gift to thank me for all my years of research into UFOs!
And this isn’t just any 50,000 year old comet! According to Jeffrey Klugger, in “The Story Behind the Green Comet That’s Flying Past the Earth,” (Time.com, January 23, 2023), this one is somewhat unique! C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is a “dazzling green” color, reserved for comets that travel close to the sun, and has not one but TWO tails! Most comets only have one tail, which is made of dust and ice interacting with the solar wind. C/2022 E3 (ZTF) also has a less common second tail that is made of ionized carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen molecules that some comet bodies carry. According to one of the scientists who discovered it, Bryce Bolin, “The ion tail interacts with charged particles in the solar wind and is pushed in the opposite direction from the sun, along the flow of the wind.” But even more spectacular is this comet is traveling from the Oort Cloud, “a sphere of similar objects that surrounds the solar system much more distantly, with its outer fringes reaching up to two light years away. Comets from the Oort Cloud can take anywhere from 200 years to 1 million years to complete a single transit of the solar system.” So a lot of coordination had to take place for it to visit earth just in time for MY birthday!
If you would like to view my out of this world birthday gift, according to the folks at Space.com, from New York City, “it will be visible in the Camelopardalis constellation while at perigee, a large but faint area of sky devoid of bright stars and located close to the north celestial pole.” They go on to explain, “the comet will become visible at around 6:49 p.m. EST (2349 GMT) on Wednesday (Feb. 1) when it will be 49 degrees over the northern horizon. C/2022 E3 (ZTF) will climb to its highest point in the sky, 58 degrees over the northern horizon, at around 9:46 p.m. EST (0246 GMT). Following this it will disappear in the dawn light at around 5:57 a.m. EST (1057 GMT) on Feb. 2 while at around 30 degrees over the horizon to the north.” Didn’t get all that? Well In-the-Sky.org published more detailed information and a finder chart to help you view this once in a lifetime event.
Now about the name, C/2022 E3 (ZTF). Bryce Bolin, a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center, and Frank Masci, a senior scientist at Caltech, were the first to see this comet in 50,000 years on March 2, 2022, using a very sophisticated camera and computer at the Zwicky Transient Facility. Hence the ZTF in the name. The 2022 stands for the year discovered, and I’m guessing E3 has something to do with how it is characterized. And the “C” well although I’d like to think it is the first initial of my name, in reality it probably stands for comet. But let’s all pretend it is named for me, Chuck Billy, shall we? After all it is arriving in time for my 11th birthday!
