SKY · COMETS
Comets Visible Now & What's Coming
A handful of comets are within reach of a telescope, binoculars, or — on a lucky occasion — the naked eye at any given time. Here's where each one is right now, how bright it actually is (not just how bright it was predicted to be), and whether it's worth hunting for from your city tonight. Including the rare interstellar visitors that pass through from beyond our Solar System.
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Why we don't over-promise on comets
Comets are made of ice and dust, and how brightly they shine depends on how vigorously that ice turns to gas as they near the Sun — which is genuinely hard to predict. History is full of comets hyped as “the comet of the century” that fizzled, and quiet ones that suddenly flared. So we show the live, measured magnitude from NASA/JPL Horizons alongside the prediction, and we tell you plainly which instrument you'd need. A comet at magnitude 12 is a real object you can find with a backyard telescope — it just isn't the naked-eye spectacle the headlines sometimes promise.
Comet visibility by city
132 CITIESEach city page works out whether each tracked comet is above your horizon after dark, which way to look, and how high it climbs.