Comet C/2020 M3 (ATLAS)
There is no dearth of spectacular comets in our skies this fall. One of them is the comet C/2020M3 (ATLAS), called so because it was discovered in 2020 (in June) by the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS). It had passed the perihelion on 25 October, and was closest to the Earth at just 2.9 light-minutes away on November 14th. It turned out to be a periodic comet, but its next visit will be only in 2159. Surprisingly, this comet does not have a pronounced tail, but has an extended coma, about 340,000 km in diameter by some estimates: almost the distance from Earth to the Moon.
We have taken images of this comet on HCT, Hanle on November 17th in B, V, R and I filters (top row of images). It is much brighter in I filter which suggests that it has lots of dust in the coma (the 60-sec I image shows the extent), but only a spectroscopic analysis can reveal the actual details of the emission. Each image shown here is 10x10 arcmin in size.
