Simeon Schmauß

Last November the ESA JUICE Spacecraft captured the interstellar comet 3I/Atlas shortly after its closest approach to the sun.

Here is my reprocessed version of the Juice NavCam images from this encounter. For this animation I removed the static noise and aligned the images to the nucleus.

Credit: ESA/Juice/NavCam
Processing: Simeon Schmauß CC-BY-SA

#esa #space #comet #3IAtlas

Mar 23 at 3:09pmWeb
Show threadSimeon Schmauß5d ago

Having five good images for each date also allowed me to stack them to improve the details of the tail.
In some of the images the gas and the dust tail can be seen separately.

Since the stars moved relative to the fast moving comet, they could be removed during the image stacking.

#comet #3IAtlas

Show threadSimeon Schmauß5d ago
Here I tried to align the images to the ecliptic plane. The comet is moving to the right of the frame, with the dust tail following behind in its orbit.
The other tail moving in clockwise direction is the ion tail that's pointing away from the sun due to solar wind.
Show threadSimeon Schmauß5d ago

You can also find this animation at a higher quality on my flickr page:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/semeion/55164070125/#comment72157720497555050

Read more on the ESA story:
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Operations/A_rare_encounter_How_Juice_came_to_observe_3I_ATLAS

JUICE Navcam - 3I/Atlas - November 2nd, 2025

Flickr