In November and December 2025 heavy fog covered eastern Austria for quite a few weeks, which delayed my plans to capture the humble appearance of comet ATLAS. The reason why I had the tiny wanderer on my agenda is that this object is just the third comet ever to be reliably confirmed to come from an alien stellar system. The hyperbolic path around our sun revealed the nature of these exotic objects; the excess of kinetic energy confirms the extrasolar origin beyond doubt.
However, so far all three objects cruising on similar paths were heavily discussed because of their marginality between comets and asteroids. The evaporation of gas and dust in the vicinity of our sun generates so-called "non-gravitational" effects that even sparked crazy speculations about the nature of these objects. Some comments even ranked around alien spaceships travelling our solar system. Not the latter, but all of the above made me curious about this specific object.
At 03:30a my alarm clock rang and half an hour later I started my car with my astro-equipment prepared. As I arrived at Bockfließ, the sky was clear, but I was surprised how far the Spring constellations were crossing the meridian. The seeing was not optimal, but I was happy to capture fifty 30-seconds exposures.
I hope you don't mind the star trails, but the comet's apparent speed was close to maximum while it traveled past our sun.
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