2026-09-13
Comet NEOWISE Rising over the Adriatic Sea
Today's window into deep space: Comet NEOWISE Rising over the Adriatic Sea. The story behind the image:
Why this matters
What you're looking at ties directly to near-Earth objects, the night sky. Every frame the world's observatories capture adds another data point to humanity's slowly-assembling map of everything beyond our planet.
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The science, from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day
This sight was worth getting out of bed early. Just over four years ago, Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) rose before dawn to the delight of northern sky enthusiasts awake that early. Up before sunrise on July 8th, the featured photographer was able to capture in dramatic fashion one of the few comets visible to the unaided eye this century, an inner-Solar System intruder that has become known as the Great Comet of 2020. The resulting video detailed Comet NEOWISE from Italy rising over the Adriatic Sea. The featured time-lapse video combines over 240 images taken over 30 minutes. The comet was seen rising through a foreground of bright and undulating noctilucent clouds, and before a background of distant stars. Comet NEOWISE remained unexpectedly bright for over a month, with its ion and dust tails found to emanate from a nucleus spanning about five kilometers across. APOD's main NASA site is moving: From apod.nasa.gov to science.nasa.gov/apod
Image credit: Paolo Girotti · Source: NASA APOD
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