Comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon gave us a completely unexpected space show. On the evening of October 24th, between 7.39pm and 7.41pm, astrophysicist Gianluca Masi was lucky enough to immortalize the crossing of a meteor, right in the region of the sky where Lemmon was visible.
Comet Lemmon encounters a meteor
As told by Masi, at that moment the acquisition of a series of images was underway using the wide-field astrograph part of the Virtual Telescope Project’s instrumentation installed in Manciano (Grosseto), under the purest sky from light pollution in peninsular Italy: “During the recording, between 7.43pm and 7.45pm, the persistent trail left by the meteor, with a clear reddish tint, is clearly visible”.
The phenomenon is associated with the ionization of molecular oxygen present in the atmosphere, due to the meteoric event, and its subsequent recombination, which corresponds to the emission of light energy at that wavelength. The shot published on the Virtual Telescope Project website shows the so-called “afterglow” of the meteor appearing to twist around the comet’s ion tail: a pure perspective miracle, since the former is an atmospheric phenomenon, induced by the meteor, while the comet was about 100 million kilometers away.