Comets Lemmon and SWAN
Taken by Mike Olason on October 18, 2025 @
Mountain, North Dakota
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Camera Used: Unavailable Unavailable
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Details:
Comets C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) and C/2025 R2 (SWAN) on the evening of October 18. The pictures were taken a few minutes apart at about 8pm with the same SeeStar S50 automated telescope/mount/camera system, both pictures were a stack of 3 images each 10 seconds long. Everything about both pictures is as equal as possible so that one can compare equally how both comets look next to each other as seen from the surface of the Earth. As one can see, Comet Lemmon is much brighter than Comet SWAN, about 3 times brighter with Comet Lemmon at magnitude 5.4 and Comet SWAN magnitude 6.6 in these pictures as calculated by Astrometrica software. Comet Swan is near the center of our Milky Way Galaxy as one can see from all the background stars in the picture, Comet Lemmon has a nice bright broad tail which extends a long way beyond the field of view of this picture. Both comets are making their closest approach to Earth in the next several days with Comet Lemmon about 55 million miles from Earth and Comet SWAN 24 million miles from Earth. Comet SWAN will start to get fainter after its close approach to Earth as it is now moving away from the Sun but Comet Lemmon should get about 3 times brighter over the next few weeks as it is approaching perihelion in its orbit (nearest approach to the Sun) on November 8 which will make it a nice binocular object in the northwest evening skies above the horizon shortly after it gets dark and maybe some will be able to see it with their unaided eyes from a dark location. Comet SWAN is above the southwest horizon after it gets dark. Click on the picture to get the full resolution picture.
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