I’ve been following – or trying to follow – Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) for over a month now, but the weather has been against me, like it has for most UK observers.
Night after night of cloud meant I only saw it half a dozen times during September.
And to do that I had to get up at you’re-having-a-laugh o’clock and carry my gear across the road to set up in the middle of a park surrounded by streetlights.
In fact, the town where I live, Kendal, in Cumbria, UK, has so much light pollution now it could probably double for Los Angeles if they ever make another Bladerunner film.
Keep up with the latest news via our comet C/2025 A6 blog
But against those odds I managed to get a few images with my Seestar S50, and while my images were nowhere near as good as the ones being taken by advanced astrophotographers using state-of-the-art telescopes and cameras under skies as black as squid ink, I was relieved just to get something…
But as October 2025 began, the clouds across the UK grew thicker and fouler and simply refused to budge. A blocking high had trapped them and they were going nowhere.
Comet Lemmon was definitely starting to feel like the comet that got away…
In search of darker skies
But last week we travelled up to Kielder in the north east of England, a place famous for its dark skies, to attend a pair of annual astronomy events.
And as we inflated our caravan awning, I looked up at the leaden sky and thought "It will clear, surely. I can’t come all this way and not see it!"
But the cloud didn’t move.
That night was totally cloudy… and the following night too… and the next… and the NEXT…
All I could do was look enviously at the beautiful images of Comet Lemmon and its rapidly lengthening tail being posted online by observers in other parts of the world.
I wondered if I’d see it at all before we left and headed back to the bright lights of Kendal.
And then…
At teatime on Saturday 18 October, the cloud began to thin, just enough to cast shadows behind the trees around us and allow a hint of blue to appear above us.
By 7pm the sky was almost two thirds clear, and although there was still a high haze layer softening the stars, at least the stars were actually visible, for the first time in almost a fortnight.
I could just see Arcturus winking above the trees, so I set up my Seestar and after going through its calibrations set it looking for comet Lemmon.
BUt it wasn’t there, at least not yet. It was still behind a bank of cloud to the northwest. But I kept trying. And trying.
nd suddenly there it was, on my phone screen: a misty, gold-hued star. comet Lemmon was in view. At last!
Capturing the comet
I set my Seestar taking photos while I began to manually hunt for the comet with my telescope, a beautiful sleek black 8-inch Dobsonian.
It took ages to find because it was so faint in the still-bright sky, but eventually it appeared in the eyepiece field of view: a 'star', surrounded by a misty halo of grey-white, like chalk-dust smudged on blue paper with a fingertip. Gotcha!
And as the sky darkened, the comet appeared more and more obvious, and its tail began to appear too, stretching off to the lower left as seen through the telescope.
I checked my Seestar and the images it was taking were gorgeous. Exactly what I’d hoped to take from Kielder.
For the next hour or so I showed many people the comet through the telescope, and as the sky grew darker it just looked more and more impressive.
As people looked into the telescope I searched for it with my naked eye but it wasn’t visible, the sky was just too hazy I think.
But the Seestar images were getting better and better, and the tail was appearing brighter and brighter in the telescope eyepiece.
Once the crowd had thinned I took a look myself, only to find the comet looked much fainter, and the field of view was a pale pink.
My first thought was that someone was standing nearby with a red light torch, so I stood back and prepared to ask them to move.
But it wasn’t the beam of a red light torch dimming the comet, it was a beam of a different kind.
The Northern Lights were shining above the trees, and hiding the comet!
So that was it for my comet-watching. Instead I led people up to the top of the field to watch the Northern Lights swaying above the treetops and photograph them with their phones.
The sky was still hazy, and thicker cloud was rolling in from the east, but we had a great view of green arcs and bright red beams for a while.
Meanwhile the comet was hidden behind the aurora, out of sight behind the trees.
I’ve not seen it since, and looking at the forecast I don’t think I will again before we leave, but at least I saw it, even if it was stolen from me by the aurora!
What next for comet Lemmon?
Despite all the insane levels of online hype and misinformation about it, comet Lemmon is not 'lighting up the sky' or 'dazzling skywatchers'.
It isn’t – and was never going to be – a Great Comet like Hale-Bopp.
It’s not even as bright or as visually striking at comet C/2023 A3, which delighted us all last year.
I think only a very small number of people are going to manage to see it with their naked eye.
But it’s a lovely sight in binoculars and telescopes, and is easy to pick up on camera, so you should definitely make an effort to see it if you haven’t already.
As of late October, comet C/2025 A6 LEMMON has now passed beneath the handle of the Big Dipper / Plough and is heading towards Arcturus.
It is now easier to see in the evening sky than the morning sky, and has reached magnitude +5, or maybe even +4.5, according to some observers.
A few experienced observers blessed with clear skies have reported seeing it with their unaided eyes, but most people are having to use binoculars and telescopes to see it.
A short length of tail is visible through those binoculars and telescopes, but long exposure images are showing the tail stretching for a very respectable length, perhaps ten degrees or longer.
It will very soon be at its closest to Earth, just as it is passing above Arcturus, and after that will fade rapidly.
So if you want to see it at its best, you need to do that in the next few days. Get out there and catch it while you can!
Share your comet Lemmon observations and images with us by emailing contactus@skyatnightmagazine.com
