Black Swan

It's a little early to get excited by this at the moment as it's so far our however it's certainly worth taking onboard now and paying attention to future updates when the orbit gets refined. A new comet has been discovered called C/2010 X1 Elenin which will approach to within 0.03 AU of Earth on Oct. 27, 2011 with perihelion on Sept 11th. So far CCD magnitudes place the comet at +6.0 making it a binocular or faint naked eye object for that time however since CCD photometry is several magnitudes fainter than visual estimates then the true peak magnitude of this comet could be within the +2.0 range making this a bright naked eye comet and similar in brightness to Polaris the Pole Star. More information about this photogenic comet potential closer to the time, this could turn out to be an exciting comet. Here are the details from the comets mailing list...

From Astrophotoweather.