Comet NEOWISE

C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)
	Comet 2020 F3 (NEOWISE) on Jul 14 2020 aligned to stars.jpg C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) photographed from Germany on July 14, 2020
Discovery
Discovered by:	NEOWISE
Discovery date:	March 27, 2020
Orbital characteristics A
Epoch:	2458953.5 (April 14, 2020)
Aphelion:	538 AU (inbound); 710 AU (outbound)
Perihelion:	0.29478 AU
Semi-major axis:	270 AU (inbound); 355 AU (outbound)
Eccentricity:	0.99921
Orbital period:	~4400 yrs (inbound); ~6700 yrs (outbound)
Inclination:	128.93°
Last perihelion:	July 3, 2020
Next perihelion:	unknown

C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE), or Comet NEOWISE, is a retrograde comet with a near-parabolic orbit discovered on March 27, 2020, by astronomers using the NEOWISE space telescope.

At that time it was a 10th magnitude comet, located 2 AU (300 million km; 190 million mi) away from the Sun and 1.7 AU (250 million km; 160 million mi) away from Earth.

The comet is notable for being one of the brightest visible to observers in the northern hemisphere since Comet Hale–Bopp in 1997.^[1]

Comet NEOWISE Media

Discovery image – the comet appears as three fuzzy red dots in this composite of three infrared images taken by NEOWISE on March 27, 2020
Diagram of the comet's nearly parabolic orbit
Comet's position in the sky – the retrograde loops are caused by parallax from Earth's annual motion around the Sun; the most apparent movement occurs when the comet is closest to Earth
Animation of C/2020 F3's orbit around Sun C/2020 F3 · Sun · Mercury · Venus · Earth · Mars
July 7, 2020, Golden Gate Bridge, California, United States
Inverted telescope image photographed on July 9, 2020
July 14, 2020 near the San Francisco Peaks in the Flagstaff dark sky preserve
July 17, 2020, 18:59 UTC over Asterousia, Crete, as it entered into Ursa Major
Comet C2020 NEOWISE 17-07-2020 20:51:57 UTC La Canada Observatory
Midnight, July 18, 2020 – in a time-lapse taken from the Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, U.S. the view was rotating because the lens was on a tracking mount