Newly discovered comets in the October sky
Telescopes at the ready: several comets will be in the sky in the coming days and weeks. They have all been discovered recently.
Comet C2025 A6 (Lemmon), photographed on 2 October 2025
(Image: Dimitrios Katevainis/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0))
Stargazers can rejoice: This month, – provided the weather plays along – several comets that were only discovered this year will be visible in the sky.
The first is C/2025 R2 (SWAN), which is currently easier to observe from the southern hemisphere. In our latitudes, it will be visible from around the middle of the month, said Uwe Pilz from the Vereinigung der Sternfreunde (VdS) to the newspapers of the Ippen Media Group.
The comet will appear in the middle of the month in the constellation of the Serpent Bearer. From 22 to 25 October, it can be seen below the southern wing of the constellation Swan. “This region is quite high in the evening sky,” said Pilz. It will not be visible to the naked eye, so binoculars will be needed.
C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) can be seen with the naked eye
C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) will also appear. It can currently only be seen with a telescope, but from the middle of the month it will also be visible to the naked eye. It is brightest from the end of October to the beginning of November. According to Pilz, the comet is easiest to find between 21 and 23 October, when it will pass below the stars Rho and Epsilon in the constellation Bootes.
In addition to those mentioned, a third comet, C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), can currently be seen, but only in the far south of the northern hemisphere and in the southern hemisphere. It will reach its closest point to the sun (perihelion) on 8 October and could then break apart. However, if C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) survives the perihelion, it can also be observed with a telescope in our latitudes in the coming months.
The comets originate from our solar system and were discovered this year: C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) was discovered at the beginning of January by the Mount Lemmon Survey (MLS) in California. The telescope is on the lookout for Near Earth Objects (NEO) and Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHA).
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C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) was detected in May by the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS). Finally, C/2025 R2 (SWAN) was discovered by an amateur astronomer in September on images from the SWAN instrument of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) space telescope.
(wpl)
