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Score breakdown
· 4 badges
36 pts · Rare
Rare50 pts → Epic
Far-flung orbit (a > 50 AU)+14
Retrograde orbit+8
Has a proper name+8
Comet+6
Total score36
14 more points to reach Epic.
Badges
☄️Comet· +6
⏪Retrograde orbit· +8
🏷️Has a proper name· +8
🛤️Far-flung orbit (a > 50 AU)· +14
✨ Trivia
Hard to believe
🔄Against the traffic. It goes round the Sun backwards, against the direction every planet and almost everything else travels.
What it actually is
🛸Its orbit family. A long-period comet falling in from the Oort Cloud, where it spent billions of years in the deep freeze before something nudged it loose.
🌞Closest approach. At its nearest it comes within 0.59 AU of the Sun — inside the orbit of Venus.
🔁One lap. A single orbit around the Sun takes it about 14.1 thousand years.
🥏How far it roams. Its orbit swings between 0.58 and 1167.02 AU from the Sun.
Standing on it
💨Growing a tail. Once inside roughly the orbit of Mars the ice starts turning straight to gas, blowing out the coma and tail that make a comet a comet.
☄️Tail. Its tail always points away from the Sun, never trailing behind its motion — it is blown, not dragged.
By the numbers
🧊Made of. A comet is a dirty snowball: water ice, frozen carbon dioxide and dust, held together loosely enough that some simply crumble when the Sun warms them.
Properties
aphelion au
1167
designation
2006 WD4
eccentricity
0.999
full name
C/2006 WD4 (Lemmon)
inclination
152.7
mean motion deg day
0.0001
moid au
0.0873
name
C/2006 WD4 (Lemmon)
named
yes
orbit class
COM
perihelion au
0.591
semi major au
583.8
About C/2006 WD4 (Lemmon)
C/2006 WD4 (Lemmon) is a rare comet. It swings within 0.591 AU of the Sun at perihelion.
A long-period comet falling in from the Oort Cloud, where it spent billions of years in the deep freeze before something nudged it loose.
How to see it
Like any astronomical target, C/2006 WD4 (Lemmon) is best seen from a dark site away from city lights, and when it is above the horizon depends on your latitude and the time of year. Because it moves against the background stars, the live position panel on this page tracks where it is right now. The visibility panel above works out tonight's viewing window for your saved location.
Why C/2006 WD4 (Lemmon) is a rare comet
C/2006 WD4 (Lemmon) scores 36 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 14 points would lift it into a rarer tier.
That score comes from 4 science badges — Comet, Retrograde orbit, Has a proper name and Far-flung orbit (a > 50 AU) — each earned for a real, measurable property of the object. Rarity on Spacedle is never random: the more remarkable an object's astrophysics, the more badges it collects, the higher it scores, and the rarer it ranks.