Nature is treating Earth to a show.

First the northern lights dazzled skywatchers around Maryland with great views and colors. Saturday, around sunset, a rare comet will be visible along the horizon in the western sky.

Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, a once-in-80,000-years sight, will pass within 44 million miles of Earth, making it watchable with the naked eye in Maryland and much of the Northern Hemisphere. The comet will make its pass just after sunset, which is 6:31 p.m. Saturday.

Sky & Telescope, a publication that focuses on the celestial, says it will be a short window to see the comet without binoculars or a telescope. By Halloween, it won’t be visible to the naked eye. By early November, it will have cruised far enough into space that it won’t be visible at all.

The space rock, also known as Comet C/2023 A3 or Comet A3, and its tail orbit the sun once every 80,000 years. The last time humans saw this comet unassisted, they had just migrated from Africa to Asia. Before this pass, no living person had seen Tsuchinshan-ATLAS without a telescope or binoculars.

The comet started its trip from what’s known as the Oort cloud, beyond Pluto. Yeah, this thing has been on a long, long journey.

The comet is named for the two skywatchers who discovered it — China’s Purple Mountain Observatory (tsuchinshan means “purple mountain”) and South Africa’s Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) — in 2023.

The comet was visible with the unaided eye before dawn in the Southern Hemisphere in September.