Signs in the heavens? Two comets racing towards Earth and Sun: ‘unprecedented’

November 23, 2013 – SPACE – NASA spotted Comet ISON coming on strong on Thursday. An awesome set of images shows Comet Encke, its tail wriggling, along with Mercury and Earth. Then ISON enters the field. It looks like a comet race. It’s evidence, the space agency says, that ISON is still intact and hasn’t splintered as it approaches the sun. A camera on NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory captured the action Thursday. Watch the tails of the comets below. Solar wind, the particles that stream outward from the sun at 1 million miles per hour, make the comets’ tails move. – LA Times

Double Comets: Battams points out another exciting development: Comet Encke and Comet ISON are converging for a photogenic close encounter. “No they’re not going to hit each other – in reality they are millions of miles apart – but as seen from the STEREO-A spacecraft, they are going to get very close!” he says. “We are probably a couple of days away from seeing two comets almost side-by-side in that camera, with long tails flowing behind them in the solar wind. To say that such an image will be unprecedented is rather an understatement.” Stay tuned for that. –Space Weather

Comet ISON seen in the dawn sky with the planet Mercury in the background. The comets arrive around the time of the Leonids meteor showers, to create even more spectacles to watch in space.