A brilliant comet lights up the night sky over Chile's Atacama Desert in this stunning image captured by a photographer with the European Southern Observatory in January 2025. What you're seeing ...

The comet in question is called C/2023 A3, and was discovered back in January by astronomers at the Purple Mountain Observatory in China. The comet has also been seen in images captured by the ...

or 1 km, in size) and on more distant, elliptical orbits. Even without the advent of the Rubin Observatory, there is plenty ...

The brightest object left of center is the moon, while the faint, wispy tail of comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) can be seen at the far left, just to the right of one of the observatory's telescopes.

The moon, the Milky Way, Saturn, Venus, Jupiter Mars, Neptune, Uranus and comet C/2024 G3 seen above the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile's Atacama Desert. . | Credit ...