Super comet approaching!

HOUSTON, Texas (PNN) - October 9, 2012 - It appears that we have a bright comet heading this way in late next year. What we know right now is that it will be bright and possibly super bright before it is all over. So it is worth the effort to be ready for it.

This could also be a major outgasser and provide us with a giant tail to watch. Cross your fingers.

In the event this is our first notice and I am sure it will be followed with plenty of other stories. It has real potential to be spectacular although folks will keep quiet because we have been skunked before. This at least seems to be a new event.

Calculations show that the celestial visitor could be dazzlingly bright in November 2013 and be easily visible in broad daylight as it rounds the Sun.

Comet ISON is so named because it was first spotted on photos taken by Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok from Russia using the International Scientific Optical Network telescope.

It is currently very faint because it is out in the depths of space near Jupiter's orbit. But it will steadily brighten over the coming months until it passes less than two million km from the Sun on November 28.

That makes it a type of comet called a sungrazer, and there is a risk that the comet - essentially a giant ball of rock and ice, will break up when it makes that close approach.

But it could become brighter than the greatest comet of the last century, Comet Ikeya-Seki, which excited astronomers in 1965.