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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 2.4 AU of the Sun — inside the orbit of Jupiter.
🔁One lap. A single orbit around the Sun takes it about 1232 years.
🥏How far it roams. Its orbit swings between 2.4 and 227.4 AU from the Sun.
Standing on it
🥶Sunlight there. Even at its closest the sunlight is only about 17% as strong as Earth's.
☄️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
227.42
designation
2014 W5
eccentricity
0.9791
full name
C/2014 W5 (Lemmon-PANSTARRS)
inclination
145.49
mean motion deg day
0.0008
moid au
1.64
name
C/2014 W5 (Lemmon-PANSTARRS)
named
yes
orbit class
COM
perihelion au
2.399
semi major au
114.9
About C/2014 W5 (Lemmon-PANSTARRS)
C/2014 W5 (Lemmon-PANSTARRS) is a rare comet. It swings within 2.399 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/2014 W5 (Lemmon-PANSTARRS) 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/2014 W5 (Lemmon-PANSTARRS) is a rare comet
C/2014 W5 (Lemmon-PANSTARRS) 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.