2025-10-21

The conditions tonight were great! A new moon, below the horizon and not a cloud to be seen. The air felt crisp again and I had to bundle up for the first time in a few months.

Since the last time observing, I have added the Astro League’s Multiple Star challenge to my list of observing targets. In spite of that, I wanted to start off viewing Comet C2025 R2 (SWAN).

8:42PM

Image

I spent way too much time confirming that I was looking at the comet. It was bright and obvious and could be seen easily in my finder scope, however it did not appear like a comet. I kept thinking that stumbled on a globular star cluster, but no cluster this bright was indicated on my field atlas. I made multiple attempts to star hop from both λ Aquilae and ι Aquilae to ensure I wasn’t looking at the wrong thing. Sure enough, this was the comet. Located just south of 37 Aquilae.

No tail of the comet could be detected, not even after multiple attempts of using AV. I swapped to the wide-field lens at 26x to see if I could get a better impression of the tail, but no luck.

Either way, the head of the comet that I could see was bright and beautiful. After spending another 15 to 20 minutes with AV, I did see a split second glimpse of what might have been the tail, but I’m still not confident with it.