Tootfinder

There have been numerous disgustingly fake 'nightscape' composites flooding the web where someone had merely pasted a deep astronomical image of comet C/2026 A6 #Lemmon into some landscape, making it look like it was a giant rivalling Ikeya-Seki oder West - oh, how I hated that. And what a relief that NOIRLab has now posted - https://noirlab.edu/public/images/iotw2549a/ - this beautiful and apparently unmanipulated picture of Lemmon over Mauna Kea on 12 November. Yes, it reached 3 point something mag. and had nice tails in the end but it was not a great comet by any means: just look how small and faint it appears next to the southern Milky Way!

There is also a #PUNCH video showing only #comet #Lemmon and its tails in https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/punch/2025/12/19/nasas-punch-spies-comet-lemmon/ - unfortunately too faint so much tail structure gets lost which can be glimpsed in the full video. But the data are there, waiting for someone to process them for science.

Wanna see an amazing uninterrupted multi-day timelapse of the plasma tail of comet #Lemmon blowing the #SolarWind in October/November? It's happening in the #PUNCH video embedded in the press release https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/punch/2025/12/18/nasas-punch-releases-refined-images-of-eruptions-from-the-sun/ - and see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kk05oIEeJ0 for a version with constellation lines.

And here comes my #Bochum, Germany, #Lemmon number 6: today it was very clear for a change, and the #comet with quite some tail (an effect of the imminent perigee?) showed up nicely - and even faintly in binoculars - at the end of nautical twilight.

After a complicated and one good sighting of #comet #Lemmon from #Bochum, Germany, on 20 and 24 October - see the thread https://mastodon.social/@PlanetariumBochum/115430462668539532 - more cloudy evenings followed ... but here is the comet again on 30 October, picked blindly out of a suuuuper-crappy sky with 4 seconds at f/2.8 and ISO 1600, right above 9 Herculis. Detection #3 ... and there would be one more today (see the following boost).