Sunday, January 22, 2023

Comet C2022 E3 (ZTF) with three tails



When looking more closely at my image of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) I saw a third tail. But I thought this was an artifact created by processing the image. 

Untill today, I never heard about comets having more then 2 tails. I always read that comets have 2 tails, one dust tail and one plasma (ion or gas tail). This morning I read an article on Spaceweather mentioning C/2022 E3 (ZTF) having 3 tails : see this link
So why 3 tails? This phonomenon is an optical illusion weh seeing the comet from Earth. How this happens is explained below (source wikipedia).


As a conclusion, my image of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) has 3 tails, one dust tail, one plasma and one anti tail. Below I added false colors to show more detailed all three tails.