C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)

C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) photographed from Germany on July 14, 2020
Discovery
Discovered by	NEOWISE
Discovery date	March 27, 2020
Orbital characteristics A
Epoch	2458953.5 (April 14, 2020)
Observation arc	113 days
Number of observations	376
Orbit type	Long period comet
Aphelion	538 AU (inbound) 710 AU (outbound)
Perihelion	0.29478 AU
Semi-major axis	270 AU (inbound) 355 AU (outbound)
Eccentricity	0.99921
Orbital period	~4400 yrs (inbound) ~6700 yrs (outbound)
Inclination	128.93°
Node	61.01°
Argument of periapsis	37.28°
TJupiter	−0.408
Earth MOID	0.36 AU (54 million km; 140 LD)
Jupiter MOID	0.81 AU (121 million km)
Dimensions	~5 km (3 mi)
Last perihelion	July 3, 2020
Next perihelion	unknown

C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE), or Comet NEOWISE, is a retrograde comet with a near-parabolic orbit discovered on March 27, 2020, by astronomers using the NEOWISE space telescope.

At that time it was a 10th magnitude comet, located 2 AU (300 million km; 190 million mi) away from the Sun and 1.7 AU (250 million km; 160 million mi) away from Earth.

The comet is notable for being one of the brightest visible to observers in the northern hemisphere since Comet Hale–Bopp in 1997.^[1]

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