Daily Postcard: Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) peeking through the clouds Thursday morning over Quemazon. Comet NEOWISE – discovered back in March by NASA’s NEOWISE mission – is getting the attention of skywatchers across the Northern Hemisphere this month. The comet survived its recent closest approach to the Sun, and is now headed back toward the outer solar system, where it travels to a farthest distance of 715 astronomical units, or AU, from the Sun. (For comparison, Earth orbits at 1 AU, Jupiter at 5 AU, and Neptune at 30 AU.) Its closest approach to Earth will be on July 22, at a distance of about 64 million miles (103 million kilometers). The comet takes about 6,800 years to make one lap around its long, stretched out orbit, so it won’t visit the inner solar system again for many thousands of years. Source: NASA.org. Photo by Jeff Bloch