Comet light, comet bright
Looking through satellite data from the NASA-funded citizen science Sungrazer Project, Thai amateur astronomer Worachate Boonplod spotted a new comet speeding by the Sun on December 13, a day before the eclipse. Sungrazer encourages citizens scientists to scour images from the joint European Space Agency and NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) to find new comets. Astronomers were eager to see if the little speck would be visible in eclipse photographs.
Hopeful it would appear in ground-based observations, I sent a full set of Andreas Möller’s raw eclipse images to my colleagues Vojtech Rusin and Roman Vanur in Slovakia. Lo and behold, Vanur’s resulting composite, made from five dozen of Möller’s images, indeed shows the comet.
Considering about 2,000 SOHO comets are still unnumbered, I reached out to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, encouraging them to number this new comet. It soon became SOHO–4108. Later, the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory released the comet’s new name — C/2020 X3 (SOHO). Additional observations showed it to be a Kreutz sungrazer, a family of comets stemming from a parent comet that broke up well over a thousand years ago.