(ORDO NEWS) — In the darkness of the orbital night of July 5, NASA astronaut Bob Behnken clung to the window of the International Space Station in anticipation of an incredible sight. Soon, the main object of observation of all amateur astronomers this summer, the comet NEOWISE, appeared in the predawn sky over the Earth.
Behnken and his colleagues from the ISS made hundreds of images of the comet, which were then turned into slow motion film by British graphic designer Sean Doran, who regularly processes images from NASA.
“Grab a cool drink, turn off the lights, make yourself comfortable and post the video on the big screen,” Doran urged in the video description.
Doran originally shared a quadrupled version of the video, but later uploaded it in 4K. The video shows the passage of the comet in front of observers from the ISS in real time.
The sequence consists of 550 long exposure photographs taken in seven minutes. This usually gives just 18 seconds of video, so Doran interpolated the images to fill the frames and smoothed the sequence for smooth playback.
Comet C / 2020 F3 was first detected on March 27, 2020 using the NEOWISE (The Near Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) telescope, which gave it its second name.
Comet can be observed in the Northern Hemisphere from the equator to the 60th parallel of northern latitude. In Russia, this is the entire territory south of St. Petersburg. The best observation conditions will be around July 20, when NEOWISE enters the constellation Ursa Major at +3 magnitude.
At the minimum distance from the Earth, the comet will pass on July 23. It will be 0.692 astronomical units, or 103.52 million kilometers.
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