The Cluster and the Comet

Back in June I posted about observing comets (see it here) and even mentioned the one that is currently closest to Earth which has this beautiful name: C/2017 K2 PanSTARRS. 

Comets have different parts to their names. The C means that is is a non-periodic comet. Once it makes this pass through the inner Solar System it is never coming back. 2017 was the year of its discovery and the K2 means that it was the 2nd comet discovered in the 2nd half of May. Comets also get the name of their discoverer. In this case that wasn't a person, but rather the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System, aka PanSTARRS. 

The image below shows the comet's orbit through the inner Solar System. 

It doesn't get especially close to Earth. It was at its closest a few days ago when it was 1.8 astronomical units (166 million miles) from Earth. Interestingly enough when the comet was closest to Earth it was also  nearly in the same direction in the sky as the globular star cluster Messier 10. I managed to catch them with my Unistellar eVscope 2 on July 15th.

While the cluster and the comet appear to be next to each other, they are merely in the same direction. M10 is more than 14,000 light years from Earth, but when I took this image the comet was just 15 light minutes away. That's not close at all.