Discovered on March 27, 2020 by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission, Comet NEOWISE is putting on a dazzling display for skywatchers before it disappears, not to be seen again for another 6,800 years.

The comet made its closest approach to the sun on July 3. Officially known as C/2020 F3, Comet NEOWISE is a comet that was discovered on March 27, 2020, by NEOWISE, the asteroid-hunting afterlife of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.

Comets, often nicknamed "cosmic snowballs," are icy, rocky objects made up of ice, rock and dust. These objects orbit the sun, and as they slip closer to the sun most comets heat up and start streaming two tails, one made of dust and gas and an "ion tail" made of electrically-charged gas molecules, or ions.

It's quite rare for a comet to be bright enough that we can see it with a naked eye or even with just binoculars."

There is "about 13 million Olympic swimming pools of water," in Comet NEOWISE, Emily Kramer, a science team co-investigator forNASA's NEOWISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said during a news conference July 15. "So that's a lot of water."

"Most comets are about half water and half dust," she added.

Comet NEOWISE has two tails that typically accompany every comet.

As a comet nears the sun, it warms up and material pulls away from the surface into a tail. Often, dust is pulled away along with gases from sublimating (going directly from solid to a gas) ice. This dust tail is the sweeping trail seen in most comet images. Comets also have an ion tail made up of ionized gas blown back by the solar wind.

Researchers studying Comet NEOWISE might actually also have a sodium tail. By observing what they believe to be atomic sodium in the comet's tail, researchers can glean keen insight into the object's makeup.

The comet is traveling at about 40 miles per second (that's about 144,000 mph, or 231,000 km/h).