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<span style="font-weight: bold">Over the next three nights, skywatchers should expect their best views yet of Comet Lulin. It makes its closest approach to Earth — some 38 million miles away — on Tuesday, Feb. 24.</span>
To the naked eye, the comet looks like a fuzzy patch of hazy light against the night sky. Use binoculars or telescopes, and you’ll be able to pick out its brighter center, along with its dual tail — a brighter tail of dust, and a dimmer one of ionized gases the comet sheds as its sun-warmed ices change directly from a solid to a gas.
Lulin, formally known as C/2007 N3, will dim quickly through March, thanks to the kick it’s gotten from the sun’s gravity. Then it’s Oort-a here — heading back out to its kin in the Oort Cloud, a vast collection of icy construction debris left over from the formation of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago.