Comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon: stunning tail and inner coma – 28 Oct. 2025.
We managed to collect both a close-up and a wider view of comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon, recording complex dust shells around its false nucleus and capturing, once again, its mind-blowing ion tail.
Comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon: detail of the ion tail. 28 Oct. 2025.
The image above comes from the sigma-clipping combination of 3, 60-second exposures, remotely taken with the ARTEC250+Paramount ME+C3Pro61000EC robotic unit available as part of the Virtual Telescope Project facility in Manciano, Italy, under the darkest skies of the Italian peninsula.
We decided to use short exposure times to “freeze” the fast evolving details of the ion tail. Using data coming from a short window of just six minutes, we could preserve the complex structures making this comet so spectacular.
At the same time, we wanted to image the inner coma and see if dust shells were visibile, as typical with comets so active. For this, we used the Celestron C14+Paramount ME+SBIG ST-10XME robotic unit, sporting a nice scale of 0.57”/pixel. Exploiting the benefits of the reasonably good seeing of last evening, we captured 33, 10-second images, later sigma clipping combined and carefully processed. The resultig image is below.
Comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon: close-up with dust shells. 28 Oct. 2025.
Dust waves were very well recorded, offering a complementary view on a comet otherwise mainly investigated via large field-of-view telescopes.
We managed to create a time-lapse covering about 80 minutes, showing the fast evolution of the ion tail:
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