Comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon and a meteor red afterglow: an epic image – 24 Oct. 2025.
On 24 Oct. 2025, while imaging comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon, we captured a meteor crossing the same field of view. Soon after, its red afterglow showed so nicely, adding its intriguing, fast evolving shape to the scene.
Comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon and a meteor red afterglow. 24 October 2025.
During the imaging session of comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon on the evening of October 24, I had the good fortune to witness a truly fascinating phenomenon — one that, by sheer chance, I was able to capture.
Between 17:39:30 and 17:41:30 UT, a meteor passed right through the region of the sky where Lemmon was visible.
At that moment, a sequence of wide-field images was being acquired using the astrograph that is part of the Virtual Telescope Project instrumentation, installed in Manciano (Grosseto), in the beautiful Maremma region.In the frame taken between 17:43:33 and 17:45:33 UT, the persistent trail left by the meteor is clearly visible, with a distinct reddish hue. The faint, fan-like structure is likely due to some light which reached the imaging device while capturing the picture.
The phenomenon is associated with the ionization of molecular oxygen in the atmosphere caused by the meteor event, followed by its recombination, which produces the emission of light at that wavelength. In this photograph, the meteor’s afterglow appears to coil around the comet’s ion tail — a pure perspective miracle, since the former is an atmospheric effect induced by the meteor, while the comet itself was about 100 million kilometers away.
I had never documented anything quite like it before — and to have it happen right in front of such a remarkable comet as C/2025 A6 Lemmon makes it even more extraordinary.
I’m currently working on creating a time-lapse, but in the meantime, I wanted to share this wonder.
Gianluca Masi, Virtual Telescope Project
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