Yes! I finally captured an image of comet 3I/ATLAS. Here's how I did it

Since it was discovered on 1 July 2025, by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey telescope in Río Hurtado, Chile, Comet 3I/ATLAS – the third confirmed interstellar object to visit our Solar System – has been the preserve of large-aperture amateur instruments and sophisticated astrophotography rigs, orbiting observatories and the cameras onboard space probes and rovers far out in the Solar System.

But that is changing.

On the morning of 16 November 2025, I was able to image Comet 3I/ATLAS from the middle of Kendal, Cumbria, UK using just my Seestar S50 smart telescope.

And that means, very excitingly, that the comet is now visible to small telescopes and probably less advanced cameras too.

Over the next week or so, as the comet climbs higher into the sky and the Moon falls out of the way, this will be a great opportunity for amateurs to see and image this comet.

Keep up to date with what this interstellar visitor is doing via our comet 3I rolling blog

How I finally captured the comet

Back to the morning of 16 November.

I’d been wanting to try to catch Comet 3I for a week or so, after it had moved up high enough into the morning sky, but the weather was against me.

Finally, the clouds cleared overnight, so after my alarm woke me at 4.30am and a peek out the window showed a starry sky, I took my Seestar S50 down to the river, hoping to bag this intriguing interstellar visitor.

It was a freezing cold morning, with the first signs of frost twinkling on the ground – absolutely perfect for Seestar astrophotography – but I wasn’t confident of success.

Shining a little brighter than 10th magnitude according to other reports, I knew that an object of that brightness would usually be no challenge to my smart telescope, high in a dark sky.

But this morning the comet was going to be very low in the sky, scraping the treetops, and it was going to be in an area of the sky cluttered with streetlights and very close to the bright waning crescent Moon too.

So the odds, it’s fair to say, were against me.

But after finding a bench with a clear view of the Moon, I set up, star-hopped down from Porrima to the area of Virgo where I knew the comet was (frustratingly, it’s not in my Seestar’s comet database yet) and started taking images around 5am.

And those images were awful!.

With rainbow streaks of intruding moonlight and the glare of streetlights splashed across them, they looked like photos of oily puddles.

But down at the bottom, on the left, was a tiny smudge, like a fuzzy star…

I checked the position of the object using one of my astronomy apps and could hardly believe it: the fuzzy star was the comet, 3I.

Gotcha!

I spent the next hour taking more images of the comet, repeatedly changing location whenever the comet was too close to a streetlight.

It was just a smudge, and grew progressively fainter and harder to see as the sky began to brighten with the approach of dawn until eventually it faded out of view altogether and I headed back home, barely able to feel my hands but delighted with what I’d managed to capture.

Now I’ve processed my images, it’s starting to sink in just how special they are.

My pictures of a tiny smudge aren’t impressive in any way – they’re never going to feature in a fancy astrophotography calendar – but they are images of an object from another star system, somewhere out in the Milky Way.

This is a comet that was already billions of years old before our Sun was even born; snatched portraits of an interstellar wanderer that spent millions, if not billions, of years travelling silently through the starless depths of our Galaxy before our Sun began to light up the darkness ahead of it like a lantern on a distant shore.

And they were taken from beneath the streetlights that run alongside a river in the centre of a light-polluted town, using a telescope that has been insultingly described as a 'toy' by many people.

Yeah, whatever. While they were fast asleep in their beds that morning, my 'toy' was taking images of a comet that was born billions of years ago in the light of an alien sun.

So, if you’re wanting to see and image this fascinating object, just give it a go!

You don’t need to have a telescope the size of a WW2 battleship cannon, or a camera that costs thousands of pounds now. It’s there, waiting for you.

Go get it!

If you manage to capture an image of comet 3I/ATLAS, send your images to us and they could appear in a future issue of BBC Sky at Night Magazine