Catch the fuzzy, green ‘Christmas Comet’

Look into the night sky Sunday and you just might see a bright, fuzzy ball with a greenish-gray tint.

That’s because a comet that orbits between Jupiter and the sun will make its closest approach to Earth in centuries.

“The fuzziness is just because it’s a ball of gas basically,” Tony Farnham, a research scientist in the astronomy department at the University of Maryland, said Saturday morning after a long night studying the comet at the Discovery Channel Telescope, about ?40 miles southeast of Flagstaff, Arizona. “You’ve got a 1-kilometer solid nucleus in the middle, and gas is going out hundreds of thousands of miles.”

The comet glows green because the gases emit light in green wavelengths.

The ball of gas and dust, sometimes referred to as the “Christmas comet,” was named ?46P/Wirtanen, after astronomer Carl Wirtanen, who discovered it in 1948.

It orbits the sun once every ?5.4 years, passing by Earth approximately every 11 years, but its distance varies and it is rarely this close. As the comet passes by, it will be 30 times farther from Earth than the moon, NASA said.