I took this image of comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) on October 24, 2025 from a moderately light-polluted area near my home in Springfield, Missouri. The image consists of 80 10-second images taken with an S50 Seestar refractor telescope that I stacked and processed. From our location we could not see the comet with the naked eye even though the conditions were excellent (clear sky, low humidity, no moon visible, relatively high altitude of 41 degrees).
The closest this comet came to Earth (“perigee”) was 30 million miles (one-third the distance of the Earth to the Sun) at a velocity of 130,000 mph. Its next return will be in the year 3175. Here is how the NASA website defines a comet:
Comets are cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, rock, and dust that orbit the Sun. When frozen, they are the size of a small town. When a comet's orbit brings it close to the Sun, it heats up and spews dust and gases into a giant glowing head larger than most planets. The dust and gases form a tail that stretches away from the Sun for millions of miles. There are likely billions of comets orbiting our Sun in the Kuiper Belt and even more distant Oort Cloud.