Halley's Comet current location in sky and visibility?

I am an amateur in astronomy, but recently I wonder if it is possible to see (in a photo, maybe, if not in a telescope) Halley's Comet when its not close to earth. If there is such photo, how I can find it. Thanks in advance.

1 Answer

In case you happen to have a very large telescope, here's where to look for Halley's Comet in 2019. I got these from JPL's Horizons ephemeris.

date (UTC)    h  m  s        d  m  s        T-mag    N-mag
2019-Jan-01   08 26 12.95   +01 38 11.0     25.48    28.99
2019-Feb-01   08 22 37.55   +01 48 26.3     25.48    28.97
2019-Mar-01   08 19 35.31   +02 04 26.5     25.49    28.99
2019-Apr-01   08 17 21.46   +02 24 37.7     25.52    29.04
2019-May-01   08 16 49.80   +02 41 21.1     25.55    29.07
2019-Jun-01   08 17 59.21   +02 51 29.8     25.58    29.10
2019-Jul-01   08 20 21.84   +02 52 27.8     25.60    29.10
2019-Aug-01   08 23 27.41   +02 44 30.4     25.61    29.10
2019-Sep-01   08 26 24.57   +02 29 35.3     25.60    29.10
2019-Oct-01   08 28 23.88   +02 12 04.1     25.58    29.10
2019-Nov-01   08 28 56.98   +01 55 29.1     25.56    29.08
2019-Dec-01   08 27 45.99   +01 45 32.8     25.53    29.04
2020-Jan-01   08 24 59.69   +01 45 05.9     25.51    29.00

T-mag N-mag =
Comet's approximate apparent visual total magnitude ("T-mag") and nuclear
magnitude ("N-mag") by following standard IAU definitions:
T-mag =  M1 + 5*log10(delta) + k1*log10(r)
N-mag =  M2 + 5*log10(delta) + k2*log10(r) + phcof*beta
Units: MAGNITUDES


From Wikipedia's Halley's Comet; History:

After 1986

Grainy, white-on-black image showing Halley as a barely distinguishable black dot Halley's Comet observed in 2003 at 28 AU from the Sun

On 12 February 1991, at a distance of 14.4 AU (2.15×109 km) from the Sun, Halley displayed an outburst that lasted for several months, releasing a cloud of dust 300,000 km across.49 The outburst likely started in December 1990, and then the comet brightened from magnitude 24.3 to magnitude 18.9.112 Halley was most recently observed in 2003 by three of the Very Large Telescopes at Paranal, Chile, when Halley's magnitude was 28.2. The telescopes observed Halley, at the faintest and farthest any comet has ever been imaged, in order to verify a method for finding very faint trans-Neptunian objects.9 Astronomers are now able to observe the comet at any point in its orbit.9

9New Image of Comet Halley in the Cold". European Southern Observatory. 1 September 2003. Retrieved 26 February 2018.

49J. C. Brandt. "McGraw−Hill AccessScience: Halley's Comet" (PDF). McGraw-Hill. Retrieved 27 November 2009.)

112D. Prialnik; A. Bar-Nun (1992). "Crystallization of amorphous ice as the cause of Comet P/Halley's outburst at 14 AU". Astronomy and Astrophysics. 258 (2): L9–L12. Bibcode:1992A&A...258L...9P.

You can view Halley's Comet's orbit in 3D here: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=1P;orb=1

caption: Seventeen years after the last passage of Comet Halley, the ESO Very Large Telescope at Paranal (Chile) has captured a unique image of this famous object as it cruises through the outer solar system. It is completely inactive in this cold environment. No other comet has ever been observed this far - 4200 million km from the Sun - or that faint - nearly 1000 million times fainter than what can be perceived with the unaided eye. This observation is a byproduct of a dedicated search 1 for small Trans-Neptunian Objects, a population of icy bodies of which more than 600 have been found during the past decade.

Source

A record observation At 28.06 AU heliocentric distance (1 AU = 149,600,000 km - the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun), this is by far the most distant observation ever made of a comet 2. It is also the faintest comet ever detected (by a factor of about 5); the previous record, magnitude 26.5, was co-held by comet Halley at 18.8 AU (with the ESO New Technology Telescope in 1994) and Comet Sanguin at 8.5 AU (with the Keck II telescope in 1997).

Interestingly, when Comet Halley reaches its largest distance from the Sun in December 2023, about 35 AU, it will only be 2.5 times fainter than it is now. The comet would still have been detected within the present exposure time. This means that with the VLT, for the first time in the long history of this comet, the astronomers now possess the means to observe it at any point in its 76-year orbit!