The comet C/2017 K2 passed by Earth at its closest point on Wednesday and Thursday, inspiring amateur astronomers to set up their backyard telescopes and find out what is going on.

Recently, interest in the comet has increased as it nears the end of its roughly three million-year journey toward the sun from the Oort Cloud. It will move toward the sun in December and then turn back toward the icy outer regions of our solar system.

Scientists have known about K2 for a long time. When NASA used the Hubble Space Telescope to take a picture of it in 2017, it was 1.5 billion miles from the sun. The comet grew to be the furthest-moving active comet in history.

The term active comet refers to comets that emit gas and dust after they are heated by the sun. This is the reason why comets have distinctive tails and are bright. When Hubble first observed K2 in 2017, it contained an 80,000-mile-wide cloud or coma.

K2 passed within 1.8 astronomical units of Earth on Thursday, which is almost twice its distance from the sun.

Even though amateur astronomers could not see the comet unaided at this distance, it was close enough for them to look at it.

The comet was perceived as clearly by a few observers who triple-located it or saw it clearly. A Twitter user named HyenaDae pointed out that moonlight made it difficult to take clear pictures as well as high humidity made the lenses foggy.

Starguy Mark, an astronomer who uses Twitter, shared a picture of the comet but noted that the weather was not ideal.

Taking pictures with a DSLR just because the moonlight was bright and the wind was messing up my setup made me lazy. There is nothing impressive about this comet.'

To summarize, C/2017 K2 is not as impressive a sight as other icy visitors to our region of the solar system, like Comet NEOWISE in 2020 or Comet Hale-Bopp in 1997. Since comets are pristine remains from the origin of the solar system, they are of great interest to scientists.