January
This is a composite image of the interstellar comet 3I/Atlas taken with the StarGate 500 GoTo Dobsonian and Canon R8 camera, cropped from the original. This is only the third confirmed interstellar visitor to our solar system and was confirmed countless times over the last few months to be a comet, not an alien vessel! This image was captured on Dec 20th at 3am 2025 just after closest approach to earth (yet still twice as far away as our sun!) and the same captured data is firstly stacked to give pinpoint stars but a trailed comet, then the same data is stacked on the comet to give trailed stars. The trailed stars are removed from one image and the trailed comet from the other, then the resulting images merged to give a better representation of it against the background stars.
