Comet C/2018 Y1 Iwamoto
C/2018 Y1 Iwamoto is a comet with an orbital period of 1,733 years that was discovered in December 2018 by a Japanese amateur astronomer. The object
has a very elongated orbit and can approach the Sun up to 193 million kilometers. At aphelion (the most distant point of an orbit), the comet moves as far as
287 AU from the Sun, which is 43 billion kilometers. It will not visit Earth again until the year 3752.
With an absolute magnitude of M=13.1mag, C/2018 Y1 has a size of only a few hundred meters.
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When I observed the comet with my 20" f/3.2 telescope, it was about 84 million kilometers from Earth and therefore quite bright. It was standing in a nice group
of brighter stars and showed a short tail at a magnification of 210x. The coma became brighter towards the center, but no stellar nucleus (false nucleus) was visible
in the center.
