 Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy! One of the things that I like to do in each of my introductory astronomy classes is to begin the class with the astronomy picture of the day, from the NASA website that is apod.nasa.gov slash apod. And today's picture, for September 11th of 2023, is titled Beautiful Comet Nishimura. So what do we see here? Well here we see a couple of objects in the sky and on the left we do see Comet Nishimura and that is a comet in the visible in the sky right now and in fact getting very close to the point where it can be seen without the aid of a telescope or camera or binoculars. Now we see the distinct coloration of it and we see the head pointing down toward the horizon. Now the head of the comet will always point in the direction that the sun is and in this case just below the horizon and the tail of a comet will always point away from the sun. So it allows us to get a little bit of an idea of its direction there so we can tell where the sun is there below the horizon, although you can certainly see that by the little bit of glow over the horizon as well. Now the comet is making its closest approach to Earth tomorrow. Now it's not going to get really close, there's no chance of it coming anywhere near Earth or colliding with Earth, however we won't be making its closest approach. And that means it'll be among its brightest there and will actually be getting a little bit closer to the sun over the coming week and could still brighten further, so may be more easily visible over the next couple of weeks. Now this is a comet with a relatively long period of over 400 years, meaning that the last time it came close to Earth was a little over 400 years ago and the next time it will come close to Earth will be about 400 years from now. So it takes it a long time to make its orbit and comets come in in very long elliptical orbits so they zip through the inner solar system when they're closer to our sun moving very quickly and then they'll spend most of their time out in the depths of the solar system moving at a very, very slow rate. Now the other object that we see in the image here is the planet Venus. Venus is prominent as the morning star right now. So you can see it in the morning sky just before sunrise as well as seeing comet Nishimura as well. So two objects very prominent in the early morning sky right now and a chance to look at them for in the case of Venus you'll be seeing it for the rest of the year in the morning sky and in the case of Nishimura hopefully over the next couple of weeks it will brighten enough to be visit to be a nice sight although maybe not super prominent in the sky as well. So that was our picture of the day for September 11th of 2023. It was titled Beautiful Comet Nishimura. We'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture previewed to be Galaxy's Galore. So we'll see what that is about tomorrow and until then have a great day everyone and I will see you in class.