Celestial Spectacle: Stunning Spacecraft Photos Capture the Comet’s Glorious Tail

Between January 11 and 15, 2025, a luminous comet radiated through images from the ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA’s SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) spacecraft. Designated C/2024 G3 (ATLAS), the comet reached its closest approach to the sun, known as perihelion, on January 13, traveling a mere 8 million miles (or 9% of the average Earth-sun distance) from our star.

These views of comet ATLAS were captured by SOHO’s LASCO (Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph) instrument, which employs a disk to obscure the sun’s surface and reveal subtler features of the solar atmosphere (or corona). Although this comet was initially detected in April 2024 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey, LASCO has been instrumental in discovering over 5,000 other comets as they traversed past the sun.

Karl Battams, the principal investigator for LASCO at the U.S. Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C., refined some of the images to highlight intricate features in the comet’s tail and construct the sequence above. When vibrant comets like this one approach the sun, their tails frequently respond to variations in the solar wind, which is a flow of particles and energy perpetually emanating from the sun. Heliophysicists can analyze the tails’ responses to gain deeper insights into the sun’s influence on its surroundings and on comets passing nearby.

Although it was briefly observable in Northern Hemisphere skies just after sunset close to perihelion, comet ATLAS is presently moving further away from the sun and is ideally viewed from the Southern Hemisphere, where the comet is transitioning into darker night skies. Nonetheless, there are indications that the comet may have shattered after its passage near the sun, suggesting it could diminish quickly in the upcoming days.