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| Comet Panstarrs - Bottom left at the top edge of the twilight glow |
Planets are so predictable, completing lap after lap around the Sun, like a giant sized athletics track. The Earth in its lane takes 1 year to do a complete circuit - pretty fast, but the real speed demon is the hard baked Mercury at just 88 days. Jupiter, invariably the brightest object in the sky, is a middle distance runner with an orbital period of just shy of 12 years. The true distance specialist however is Pluto - one plutonian year, one orbit of the Sun is 248 Earth years.
Then we have the cross country crowd. Not for them the confines of the athletics track. We are currently experiencing a visit from a passing stranger - Comet Panstarrs - only discovered in 2011, and with an estimated orbital period of 106,000 years. We will never see this wanderer again - having made a visit, Panstarrs is off again out into empty space. Linked by the tenuous grasp of gravity, it will be back to visit again, sometime.
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| Comet Panstarrs (with the Andromeda Galaxy above) |
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| Andromeda Galaxy and Panstarrs |
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| Comet Panstarrs |
