R3 has been making international headlines for its visibility. <\/p>\n
Similar comets pass by Earth every month but can\u2019t be seen, Aoraki said.<\/p>\n
Comets are notoriously hard to predict because as they get closer to our sun they deteriorate.<\/p>\n
Comet R3 is made of mostly ice, rock and dust.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe sun\u2019s basically ripping material off these comets,\u201d Aoraki said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard for us to calculate how bright it\u2019s going to get, or even if it\u2019s going to survive its encounter with the sun.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not all comets take 170,000 years to orbit the sun. Short-period comets orbit in under 200 years. Long-period comets, such as R3, originate from the distant Oort Cloud.<\/p>\n
The Oort Cloud is a ring of small, orbiting objects known as planetesimals between 0.3 and 3.2 light years (or 3 trillion kilometres and 30 trillion kilometres) away. <\/p>\n
R3\u2019s \u201ctail\u201d behind the comet, which is ice vaporised by the sun and pushed away by solar wind, is part of the reason it\u2019s visible to us, Aoraki said. <\/p>\n
Amateur astrophotographer Rohit Vig was one of the first to capture a photo of the comet and share it on Instagram (@sujiva) after taking a shot from Point Chevalier Beach on Wednesday at 6.46pm.<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t have to be a professional to photograph or see the comet, Vig said. He snapped it with his Nikon camera and an 85mm lens.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow it\u2019s easy with the star chart apps.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vig said he got \u201chooked\u201d on astrophotography after the first time he saw the rings of Saturn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"R3 has been making international headlines for its visibility. Similar comets pass by Earth every month but can\u2019t…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":404705,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[208486,1443,95,9526,20815,9218,208483,22669,48054,208485,305,221,78,702,117,111,139,2551,69,208484,8205,147,10534,9877,61,4518,1316,1530,80],"class_list":["post-404704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-208486","tag-about","tag-and","tag-another","tag-astronomers","tag-before","tag-c2025","tag-comet","tag-crossing","tag-disappears","tag-have","tag-how","tag-in","tag-it","tag-new","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-night","tag-nz","tag-r3","tag-rare","tag-science","tag-see","tag-skies","tag-to","tag-weeks","tag-when","tag-years","tag-zealand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=404704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404704\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/404705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=404704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=404704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=404704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}