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!

The comet #Lemmon show goes on ... images by M. Jäger and G. Rhemann from the evenings of 26 and 27 October: see https://skyweek.wordpress.com/2025/10/27/das-nordliche-finale-der-komet-lemmon-show/ for technical details (and more).

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.

Comet #Lemmon ... bathing in #aurora ... seen from the #ISS: another Kimiya Yui photograph - https://x.com/Astro_Kimiya/status/1981845320653734318 - with Gemma in CrB the bright star on the left.

Amazing raw (!) images of comet #Lemmon with different optics and cameras in the live webcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD0jJnuuwq8 from Italy from 2 1/2 hours ago.

What comet #Lemmon looks like from the #ISS right now - a picture by the Japanese #astronaut Kimiya Yui from https://x.com/Astro_Kimiya/status/1981102591494021158 with more timesteps. And see also https://x.com/Astro_Kimiya/status/1980373847154258171 and https://x.com/Astro_Kimiya/status/1980759984410423546 and the animation https://x.com/Astro_Kimiya/status/1980376397156872537

My first capture of comet #Lemmon 45 minutes ago! Under the most crappy conditions - as outlined in https://www.facebook.com/dan.fischer.393/posts/pfbid0TkKrY8H2H1brFytp38psyF5gounAyAEjmnqZyez72jRMDaqHEEHRMqRT3tkJw45xl where also more pictures are shown and technical data given - but at ~4.3 mag. according to https://cobs.si/obs_list?id=2606 and with a highly condensed coma the comet made it through in seconds, even with a bit of tail.

A remarkable video clip taken on the #ISS was just posted at #Lemmon rising with a substantial tail - and numerous #satellites flying around.

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.

Tonight comet #Lemmon was picked up by several wide-angle webcams in Europe: https://x.com/JAtanackov/status/1977456751831093352 at the Raxalpe in Austria (left) and https://bsky.app/profile/huubeggen.bsky.social/post/3m2zhian3722b in Abisko, Sweden, together with aurora. Its brightness - https://cobs.si/obs_list?id=2606 - is around 5.2 mag. now and the degree of condensation 5 to 7, so for these cameras the comets looks like a slightly fuzzy green five-mag. star.

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.

A *lot* has happened in the #comets arena in the past week: in #Lemmon, #SWAN and more.

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).