A new comet is coming to town: finally one visible by naked eye?

By Luke86 | Astrofacts | 24 Mar 2020

Atlas, or better say C/2019 Y4, would be a comet visible by naked-eye after long time.

The show could be on air at the end of May 2020. In this date the long wait for a "hairy one" should finally go to an end when the comet C/2019 Y4 called Atlas, will reach to perihelion.

Obviously this prediction is not for sure: as always in this situation, it's based on some behavior, for example the "burst", when the brightness of a comet goes up very fast.

About this comet, discovered by the ATLAS survey un Hawaii on 28th December 2019 and that has already got up of 5 points of magnitude in last days, the astronomers are optimist: it should get up until a magnitude of 1 (approximately as bright as Saturn), but otherwise there are some good possibilities it reach a magnitude greater than the visible limit (on a perfect sky, with perfect eyes, you can reach the 6th magnitude)

Here the graph of prediction