NEAT Thing In Sky

I just had my first look at Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) which is now visible in the southwestern evening sky in north temperate latitudes. It’s a good little comet: in our 4.5 magnitude skies here, it is barely visible naked-eye but it has a nice tail in 10×50 binoculars. It is currently a few degrees southeast of Procyon, and will be climbing higher in the sky daily as well as growing dimmer. Like many comets these days, Comet NEAT was discovered by an automated sky survey, in this case the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program, hence the acronym.