Comet C/2020 F5 (MASTER) makes its closest approach to the Earth on Sunday 22 August 2021, reaching a distance of 3.57 AU from the Earth (357% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun, or 354 465 000 km). At this distance the comet will be not naked eye visible, having a magnitude about 15, comparable to that of Charon, the moon of Pluto, and therefore not really visible to amateur astronomers. The comet is currently in the Constellation of Sculptor, which is best observed from the Southern Hemisphere.
Comet C/2020 F5 (MASTER) was discovered on 28 March 2020 by one of the Russian Mobile Astronomical System of Telescope-Robots (MASTER) located near San Juan, Argentina. The designation C/2020 F5 (MASTER) implies that it is a comet (C/), that it was the fifth comet-like body (5) discovered in the second half of March 2020 (period 2020 F; the year being split into 24 half-months represented by the letters A-Y, with I being excluded), and that it was discovered by the MASTER system.
C/2020 F5 (Master) was initially thought to be an Interstellar Comet, but this has now been ruled out. It is now considered to be a Parabolic Comet, which is to say a comet that
has been disrupted from an orbit in the Oort Cloud, and to be passing
through the Inner Solar System on a parabolic orbit that will probably
not bring it back again. This parabolic trajectory tilted
at an angle of 51.7° to the plain of the Solar System, and brought
it to a perihelion distance (closest point to the Sun) of 4.33 AU (470 160 000 km) from the Sun on 24 March 2021. This is between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter, though outside the Main Asteroid Belt.
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