Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
A once in a lifetime view.
During the imaging session of comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon on the evening of October 24, I had the good fortune to witness a truly fascinating phenomenon — one that, by sheer chance, I was able to capture.
Between 17:39:30 and 17:41:30 UT, a meteor passed right through the region of the sky where Lemmon was visible.
At that moment, a sequence of wide-field images was being acquired using the astrograph that is part of the Virtual Telescope Project instrumentation, installed in Manciano (Grosseto), in the beautiful Maremma region. In the frames taken in the following 25 minutes or so, the persistent trail left by the meteor is clearly visible, with a distinct reddish hue.
The phenomenon is associated with the ionization of molecular oxygen in the atmosphere caused by the meteor event, followed by its recombination, which produces the emission of light at that wavelength. In this photograph, the meteor’s afterglow appears to coil around the comet’s ion tail — a pure perspective miracle, since the former is an atmospheric effect induced by the meteor, while the comet itself was about 100 million kilometers away.
Gianluca Masi, Virtual Telescope Project
A once in a lifetime view.
During the imaging session of comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon on the evening of October 24, I had the good fortune to witness a truly fascinating phenomenon — one that, by sheer chance, I was able to capture.
Between 17:39:30 and 17:41:30 UT, a meteor passed right through the region of the sky where Lemmon was visible.
At that moment, a sequence of wide-field images was being acquired using the astrograph that is part of the Virtual Telescope Project instrumentation, installed in Manciano (Grosseto), in the beautiful Maremma region. In the frames taken in the following 25 minutes or so, the persistent trail left by the meteor is clearly visible, with a distinct reddish hue.
The phenomenon is associated with the ionization of molecular oxygen in the atmosphere caused by the meteor event, followed by its recombination, which produces the emission of light at that wavelength. In this photograph, the meteor’s afterglow appears to coil around the comet’s ion tail — a pure perspective miracle, since the former is an atmospheric effect induced by the meteor, while the comet itself was about 100 million kilometers away.
Gianluca Masi, Virtual Telescope Project
