Comet 3I (ATLAS) - on a flying visit!

[Ross Wilkinson]

At last I've managed to catch this interstellar visitor, now on its way back out of our Solar System. This comet was discovered last July and originally designated C/2025 N1, until it was found to be on a hyperbolic orbit. It reached perihelion in October, at which time it was travelling at 68km per second! It's only the third object of interstellar origin which has been detected: hence its "3I" designation.

It was an early-morning object in the autumn, but now it's getting higher in the late evening sky, currently around 12th magnitude and tracking through the constellation of Cancer. Last night I managed to catch it for half an hour, between it rising beyond the tree-line and the clouds arriving:

That's a stack of 27x 1-min exposures with my Mx716 camera on the C8 operating at f/3.5.

The discontinuous star-trails are due to the passages of clouds.