Post
by iamlucky13 » Fri Feb 02, 2007 11:33 pm
Unfortunately, no we won't get to enjoy a show from this.
McNaught crossed the ecliptic plane only 15-20 million miles from the sun, less than a quarter the earth's orbit, and at an angle of about 70 degrees. Since the particles tend to stay roughly in the path of the orbit, I don't think there's any chance of us flying through its debris.
The tail, of course, is swept by the sun out to a huge area, but my understanding is that the particles that make up the visible portion of the tail are generally too small to notice if they encounter our atmosphere. The latest APOD of the comet lists diameters ranging from 2-10 microns. I think the meteors we typically see are around a millimeter in size (1000 microns).
"Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man." ~J. Robert Oppenheimer (speaking about Albert Einstein)