A Celestial Collaboration: Unistellar Citizen Scientists Track Comets

Throughout human history, comets have fascinated us. They have gone from signs and portents of bad things to come to well-studied and even visited "dirty snowballs". Every year, observers search the skies, hoping to discover the Next Big Comet - Halley, Hyakutake, Hale–Bopp, McNaught. From SOHO and LINEAR to ATLAS and IRAS, numerous observatories have continued to add to the count of discovered comets. But it doesn't require expensive hardware or spacecraft to make similar observations from your own backyard; telescopes and even binoculars will work - at least for the brightest objects. For members of Unistellar's Citizen Science Network, however, comets can be seen at faint magnitudes under a range of night sky conditions. Join Beth Johnson as she welcomes SETI Institute Postdoctoral Fellow Ariel Graykowski to this week's SETI Live to discuss the results of citizen scientist observations of comets 12P/Pons-Brooks and C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS). Unistellar's comet activity program: https://www.unistellar.com/citizen-science/comets/