Comet C/2023 E1 Atlas
The comet C/2023 E1 ATLAS was discovered on March 1, 2023 with an apparent brightness of 19mag at the time using a robotic telescope
from South Africa - however, it could be traced back to December 25, 2022 on images. The orbital period of the periodic comet is p= 85.1
years, so it will not visit us again until 2108.
At perihelion it can approach the sun up to 153.6 million kilometers, at aphelion it moves away from it up to 5.63 billion kilometers.
With an absolute magnitude of M=16.1mag, C/2018 Y1 is only a few hundred meters in size.
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When I observed the comet with my 20" f/3.2 telescope, it was only 80 million kilometers away from Earth and therefore quite bright.
It was next to a small chain of stars and showed a roundish coma, which became only moderately brighter towards the center and was
relatively large. At a magnification of 270x I could see a faint false nucleus in the center. A tail was not visible.
