The comet's position on the night of closest approach "means we can observe it all night long from either hemisphere," Ye said.
Viewers in very dark rural areas might even be able to see the comet with the naked eye, said Adler's Hammergren, who advised consulting star charts to know exactly where to look.
For sky-watchers using small telescopes, he said, the comet "will look like a tiny fuzz ball in the sky."
"In March it'll still be observable," NASA's Yeomans said, "but it's not going to knock anybody's socks off."
Comet With Two Tails
Stargazers able to take pictures of the comet are already capturing images of Lulin's rare anti-tail.
Like other comets, Lulin is basically a combination of ices and embedded dust particles left over from the formation of the outer solar system.
Ordinary comets have tails because some of their ices vaporize as they near the sun. The resulting cloud of gases and dust is pushed away from the sun by solar particles and pressure from sunlight, Yeomans said.
But sometimes a comet is at such an angle that viewers on Earth also see a shorter tail that seems to poke out like a needle toward the sun.
This isn't really a second tail but a rare type of optical effect, Yeomans said. When Earth crosses the comet's orbital plane, we can see parts of the tail projected on both sides of the object's head.
In addition, comet Lulin is orbiting "backward" compared to the planets, so viewers on Earth should be able to see it shifting position against the background stars over a matter of minutes rather than hours.
Promising Target
Being a newcomer to the inner solar system also makes Lulin a promising comet for scientific study, Yeomans said.
"New comets still have the ices they were born with," so studying their composition gives us a window into the early solar system, he said.
For example, regular visitors such as Halley's comet might dazzle stargazers, but for scientists, "once a comet has been around the sun several times, it gets to be not nearly as interesting," he said.
That's because the older comet will have lost much of its original ices, exposing a crusty surface of debris—a condition Adler's Hammergren compares to "a snowbank on the side of the road at the end of winter."
A pristine comet, however, will be full of ices that have been largely unchanged since the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago.
Taking samples directly from a comet can be challenging, but studying its light as it passes by can help astronomers tease out the ices' chemical makeup.
(Related: "'Deep Impact' Comet Spewed Tons of Water, Study Finds.")
"Radio, infrared, and optical astronomers will be very busy observing this one," Yeomans predicts.
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