The best time to watch Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) is upon us. Grab your binoculars, telescope, or just get into a very dark area and use your eyes. This is the best comet of 2025, and it is making its closest approach to Earth today, October 21.
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The comet is bright enough to be visible to the naked eye, but it is not as bright as some of the great comets of the past few decades, such as Hale-Bopp, or even more regular comets like Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS last October. Still, if you have dark skies in your location, it shouldn’t be a problem spotting it, even though there are several hundred brighter objects in the sky.
If you are not blessed with dark skies, binoculars or a telescope are your friends. Not only will you be able to see this fascinating space rock, but you should be able to spot its thin tail and green hue. The comet will be moving away from Earth from today, but it’s getting closer to the Sun, increasing its brightness, so for the next few weeks (closest passage is on November 4), we should have good conditions to see it.
“Comet Lemmon is pretty much at its best visibility right now,” Dr Robert Massey, deputy executive director of the Royal Astronomical Society, said in a video on how best to spot it.
“The best place to look is in the evening sky. As the sky darkens, the comet will first of all be moving, over a matter of days, past the bright star Arcturus, and then further round towards the south west, beneath the stars of the Summer Triangle.”
You can consult an online planetarium if you want to find it, but it is also quite easy without. It is currently slightly more north than the setting Sun, but it will continue to move south over the coming days. It will be visible after sunset for several hours, so you can wait for darkness to fall to have a better chance of seeing it.
“It will stand out as a fairly bright, fuzzy object. It isn’t going to be like Hale-Bopp was for those who remember it back in the late 1990s, or even NEOWISE in 2020, it’s going to be a little tough to see with the eye,” Dr Massey explained.
“But, that said, it’s a reasonably bright comet as they go. The fact that you can see it easily with binoculars makes it fairly unusual, and I think for that reason alone it’s something to go and enjoy, particularly if you’ve never seen a comet before.”
If the weather in your location is less than optimal, worry not, because the Virtual Telescope Project has your back. They too have been foiled by clouds for an event today, but they are planning to do a live stream on October 24 from 5:30 pm UTC.
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