December 26, 2025
The atoms in your body have known many forms: star core, drifting dust, ocean mineral, living cell.
3I/ATLAS Flyby
Birthday · December 26, 2025
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APOD published December 26, 2025. Credit: Dan Bartlett. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Attention grabbing interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS made its not-so-close flyby of our fair planet on December 19 at a distance of 1.8 astronomical units. That's about 900 light-seconds. This deep exposure captures the comet from another star system as it gently swept across a faint background of stars in the constellation Leo about 4 days earlier. Though faint, colors emphasized in the image data show off the comet's yellowish dust tail and bluish ion tail along with a greenish tinged coma. And even as it is scrutinized by arrays of telescopes and spacecraft from planet Earth, 3I/ATLAS is headed out of the Solar System. It's presently moving outward along a hyperbolic trajectory at about 64 kilometers per second relative to the Sun, too fast to be bound by the Sun's gravity.
Image credit: Dan Bartlett