And now for something fun and, by definition, not coronavirus related. Not that some people won’t see this as a concurrent sign of the apocalypse. But there is an unusually bright comet called ATLAS out there, and we might be able to see it with the naked eye sometime in April or May.

As to how bright Comet ATLAS will get, that’s anybody’s guess. It might become faintly visible to the naked eye under dark sky conditions by mid- or late April. By mid-May, when it disappears into the bright evening twilight, perhaps it will have brightened to second magnitude — about as bright as Polaris, the North Star.

Space.com

I thought I remembered seeing Halley’s comet in the 1990s, but after reading up on it, I probably remember people talking about Halley’s comet in the 1980s (when I was in elementary school) and then saw either Hyakutake or Hale-Bopp in the 1990s (when I was in college). I live in a brightly lit city now, and am not allowed to leave my house, but back then I lived in Central Pennsylvania and if I drove for 10 minutes in any direction it would get pretty dark.

Anyway, Atlas is supposed to be visible in the North to Northwest sky. I wouldn’t mind learning to read star charts if I ever get the time, but I recently discovered that there are a ton of astronomy apps out there. I’ve been using Sky View, and it’s great but just one of many. You just point your tablet at the sky and it labels whatever is there for you. You can convince yourself it is accurate just by pointing it at the moon. It actually works just fine in the daytime, on a cloudy night, or if you point it down at the ground and want to know what a person looking up at the sky in the Australian outback might be seeing. Space is predictable like that, and GPS works that well on the average device owned by the average Joe. Pretty neat.

And as for the Apocalypse, nobody is suggesting this thing is actually headed anywhere near earth. This article says it will be 273 million miles from the Sun. The Earth is about 90 million miles from the Sun, so that is only three times the distance, but I don’t know if the Earth is on the same side as the comet right now, so it might be more. It’s far and we have plenty of other things to worry about here on our little blue dot.