see also:

• comets
• My blog post on this comet

• this comet is from the Oort cloud discovered by the Purple Mountain Observatory in China on 9 January 2023 and independently found by ATLAS South Africa on 22 February 2023. It passed perihelion at a distance of 0.39 AU (58 million km; 36 million mi) on 27 September 2024, when it became visible to the naked eye in the dawn sky (although this required a dark site and was still difficult to see requiring averted vision to see it).
• in October 2024, it became an evening object.
• the weakly hyperbolic trajectory may or may not result in the comet being ejected from the Solar System.

• After the comet had past its perihelion and became visible in the evening sky in early Oct 2024, I tried to capture it while I was in Queensland, Australia for a week but every night was clouded out, and now it was getting dimmer with each night.
• I tried again on the 21st Oct back in Victoria but this time I was thwarted by high cloud just where the comet was
• Finally, on the 24th October I managed to capture it - albeit only with a camera on a tripod - no sky tracking device on hand.
• It was only just visible to naked eye by averted vision some 1.5hrs after sunset but was more readily visible in binoculars - once you knew where to search for it
• Here are two images, the first a cropped single shot taken with a 24mm f/1.4 lens and edited in OnOne PhotoRAW, the second is a close up using a 85mm f/1.4 lens with 10 images of various exposures stacked in Affinity Photo then processed in OnOne PhotoRAW with minimal cropping.

Sony A7RIV with Sony GM 24mm f/1.4 lens 10secs at f/1.4 ISO 3200 on a tripod

Sony A7RIV with Samyang 85mm f/1.4 lens at f/1.4, varying exposures stack of 10 - 2.5secs ISO 1600-12800, on a tripod