Saturday, Oct 18, 2025

I am sharing an image I captured on October 4, 2025, depicting Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) during its fast passage across the early autumn sky above central Italy. The final image integrates about 1 hour and 30 minutes of total exposure time, but to preserve the delicate structure of the ion tail — constantly reshaped by solar wind due to the comet’s high velocity — I used a selected subset of 10 frames of 150 seconds each, aligned on the nucleus. At the time of capture, the comet was approximately 130 million kilometers (0.87 AU) from Earth, traveling at a speed of about 94,000 km/h (26.2 km/s) relative to the Sun. The bright green coma reveals emissions from diatomic carbon (C₂) and cyanogen (CN), while the bluish ion tail highlights the comet’s strong interaction with the solar magnetic field. Technical setup: Telescope: Vixen R200SS Mount: Losmandy G11 Camera: Omegon 571x Guiding: on the comet nucleus – Processing in PixInsight and Photoshop