Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) near the globular cluster NGC 362

C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) is an Oort cloud comet discovered on 3 January 2013 by Robert H. McNaught at Siding Spring Observatory using the 0.5-meter (20") Uppsala Southern Schmidt Telescope. At the time of discovery it was 7.2 AU from the Sun and located in the constellation Lepus. Comet C/2013 A1 probably took millions of years to come from the Oort cloud. After leaving the planetary region of the Solar System, the post-perihelion orbital period (epoch 2050) is estimated to be roughly 1 million years. On this image taken on August 28th 2014 from 23:00 until 23:30 LT, the comet was near the globular cluster NGC 362, which appears visually near Small Magellanic Cloud, but really is "only" 28 000 ly from Earth.

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