Comet 46p/Wirtanen Time Lapse December 16 2018

This is Comet 46p/Wirtanen as seen from Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh, NC on December 16 2018 at 10pm. This time lapse was filmed over a 1 hour period with long exposure photos shot in an interval.

"This will be the closest comet Wirtanen has come to Earth for centuries and the closest it will come to Earth for centuries," Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "This could be one of the brightest comets in years, offering astronomers an important opportunity to study a comet up close with ground-based telescopes, both optical and radar."

If you hold your fist to the sky and look a couple of fist-lengths to the right of the belt, you will spot Wirtanen. This article by Rao gives you more details about where to look, depending on when you are able to go outside for the show.

Wirtanen's unusual composition (it includes methane and carbon), as well as its close orbit to the sun, made it the original target for the European Space Agency Rosetta mission. However, Rosetta's target was changed to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which the probe studied for roughly two years, between 2014 and 2016.

Wirtanen is one of three comets that astronomer Carl Wirtanen discovered in 1948. It makes flybys of Earth every 5.4 years, cycling in a short orbit that makes it a part of the Jupiter-class family of comets. (By contrast, comets from the distant Oort Cloud, located past Neptune, may have orbital periods spanning decades, or even hundreds or thousands of years.)

These constant swings by the sun come with a cost. Wirtanen is largely made up of ices, and with the comet's repeated passes by our star, that ice has bled off over the eons — eliminating any hope of a bright tail caused by lots of material released at once, Tucker said. Also, Wirtanen has a small nucleus. The Hubble Space Telescope examined Wirtanen in 1996 and found a tiny core of only seven-tenths of a mile (1.1 km), one of the smallest cometary nuclei we know of.