Viewers gain a vivid visual record of Comet C/2020 F3, known as NEOWISE, as it rose over the Adriatic Sea, the Astronomy Picture of the Day highlights. Photographer Paolo Girotti assembled a time-lapse from over 240 frames captured across 30 minutes just before sunrise, producing footage that places the comet’s ion and dust tails against a field of distant stars and a striking foreground of noctilucent clouds.
The featured sequence preserves an appearance that drew widespread attention during the comet’s passage. APOD notes the nucleus of NEOWISE measured about five kilometers across, and the comet remained brighter than expected for more than a month, allowing enthusiasts and researchers an unusually long window for observation.
The timelapse format emphasizes dynamic aspects of the scene, including how the comet climbed above low cloud layers and how its tails extended away from the nucleus. Combining many short exposures into a single moving image compresses temporal motion, making subtle structural changes easier to see than in single photographs.
The image and brief explanation were published on APOD’s September 13, 2026 entry, credited to Paolo Girotti and posted by APOD editors Robert Nemiroff, Jerry Bonnell, Cecilia Chirenti and Keighley Rockcliffe. APOD is a service of the Astrophysics Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Science Activation and Michigan Technological University.
APOD also announced a change in its web address, moving the main collection from apod.nasa.gov to science.nasa.gov/apod. The site continues to post a new daily image, with the next entry listed as an image titled open space.
