A Comet Within Reach

Photographer

Petr Horalek

Category

Fine Art Photography - Night

Company

Submission Group

Amateur

Year

2024

Country / Region:

Slovakia

Can we touch a comet? Of course not, but we can do it symbolically. For example, the widely visible spring comet 12P/Pons-Brooks with its ~17km wide dirty-snowball-nucleus I managed to capture with precise planning on a hill of Oravská Lesná, Slovakia, with me seemingly trying to touch it in the hazy moonlit-sky, however that night on 14th March 2024, it was about 245 million kilometers away from me. The comet is now slowly moving away from Earth and will not be seen until 2094. That night, its majestic ion tail in photographs made it feel like the comet was within reach.