Jedolby

While Comet 3I/ATLAS steals all the headlines, a much better-looking comet, officially dubbed "C/2025 K1 (ATLAS)" is quietly passing over us to the north, on its way back toward the far reaches of the solar system. Although K1 ATLAS had remarkably close fly-bys of Venus and Mercury on the inbound portion of its journey around the sun, nobody has accused it of being an alien spacecraft, setting its own course, and trying to collect information about our solar system. Both of these comets have at least one thing in common. They're both called "ATLAS" because they were discovered by the same survey group known as "Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System" (or, ATLAS). A lot of comets, in fact, share that name, because ATLAS has been a very prolific discovery machine! Remember, for instance,  Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS ? That one was co-discovered by China's Purple Mountain Observatory and ATLAS. Incidentally, Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS also had a very...

  What a weird comet, eh? Here's my shot, taken this morning at around 5 o'clock. Close inspection of the image reveals somewhat of a tail pointing upward, and somewhat of another tail pointing downward. Tail and anti-tail? Perhaps. But keep in mind that we're viewing the comet such that its tails may be pointing away from us, regardless of which side of the comet they appear to be on from our perspective.  Of course, the odd shape of Comet 3I/ATLAS is just one more of several alleged anomalies that conspiracy theorists have pointed to in an effort to persuade us that it's not a comet at all, but rather a space probe sent by aliens from a distant star system to gather information about us or to attack us.  Whatever! I don't believe there's anything artificial about 3I/ATLAS. For one thing, it's come a long way and has to have traveled a very long time across the galaxy. It is likely older than our solar system, meaning that if it was launched by aliens, they...