Double delight as 2 comets captured over Indian skies

In the season of the festival of lights, two rare comets are illuminating the skies over India (and the rest of the world). Both comets — C/2025 R2 (SWAN) and C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) — can currently be seen through binoculars from dark sky locations and are expected to be at their brightest this week.

TOI captured both these icy outer-space visitors on camera on the trekking route to Dayara bugyal near Uttarkashi in Uttarakhand last week. These are among the first wide-angle visuals of the comets clicked from India. While both have a characteristic tail, its currently more prominent in comet Lemmon.

SWAN isn’t expected to return to our solar system in 20,000 years while the next chance for observers on Earth to catch a glimpse of Lemmon will be in the year 3175. This is a double delight for stargazers as it’s rare for two large comets to appear in the sky at the same time. Both comets had their closest flyby of Earth over the past two days, SWAN on Monday and Lemmon on Tuesday.

There’s uncertainty over whether these dusty snowballs will get bright enough to be seen with naked eyes. Some estimates suggest that Lemmon may brighten further.

Lemmon is the brighter of the two with a current visibility of magnitude 4.5, as per SpaceWeather.com, which technically puts it in visual range. In the -1 to 10 apparent magnitude scale, any celestial object of a magnitude below 6.5 should be visible to the eye. However, as per most accounts, the comet can currently be only seen through a pair of binoculars or a telescope. However, both show up in long-exposure camera shots.

The best time to view the comets this week is an hour after sunset, around 7pm. Lemmon appears in the northwest horizon in the Bootes constellation, close to the ‘handle’ of Big Dipper (Saptrishi). It sets around 7.45pm. SWAN is currently a little higher up in the sky, just above the teapot-shaped Sagittarius constellation in the southern horizon.

The most recent comet visible to the naked eye was C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) that made an appearance in mid-2020. If it gets any brighter, Lemmon may be the next truly visible comet.

The next few days will tell.

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