You may be thinking of our galaxy (the Milky Way) or even our solar system, which both rotate and as such are both somewhat flattened (the solar system much more so than the galaxy.)
But what’s happening here has little to do with that. If you imagine the closest distance that Earth gets to Mars as a yardstick, 3I/Atlas is about half that yardstick’s distance from Mars right now - much closer than Earth ever gets. It’s practically in Mars’ back yard.
It's in Mars' backyard, but was it, or will it also be in Jupiter's backyard? I couldn't understand that from the original post.
It seemed to me that it was just that our telescopes/cameras near Jupiter would be pointed in that direction.
It's about 0.43 AU from the comet at its nearest, whereas Earth will be pretty much on the opposite side of the Sun, making observations difficult from here.
Edit: Earth, Mars and Jupiter are in roughly 120 degrees from each other as seen from the Sun, with the Earth-Sun-Jupiter angle closing up fast and the E-S-M angle growing slightly slower. In about two months the E-S-M angle will be 180.
True, but if it were that would solve some problems in observations:
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/538/4/3038/8090496?lo...
It is passing between two point in our night sky. I believe from a plane view, if you look at our universe from the perspective of it laying flat, it is my understanding the spin of our universe means that everything ends up within a flat plane, so in a 3 dimensional space, we have a limited Y axis. The other planets are spaced out across the X and Y axis, this is passing between or across two points.
Am I thinking of this right? I know very little about astronomy.