Can you be friends with a comet? Yes! Of course. I like to imagine that I can. Of the 241 comet friends I have observed since I first spotted Comet Ikeya-Seki in October of 1965, Comet 3I/ATLAS has got to be one of my favorites. More than a mere comet, it is a friend with a personality, a beating heart, and a soul.
Comet Atlas was the highlight of the wonderful observing session 25074AN2, held on the night of 18 November 2025. That session included a check on the brightness of my favorite variable star, TV Corvi, plus a morning check on the field of the soon -to-erupt recurring nova T Coronae Borealis. I wanted to see this particular comet badly, but I was uncertain if it would be bright enough, and condensed enough, to sight. I was wrong. On the previous night Tim Hunter took a beautiful picture of the comet, that appeared at about tenth magnitude. It sported a small tail, and a second antitail in the opposite direction. I set up Eureka, my 12-inch diameter reflector telescope, and I began searching for comets in the region where I thought this comet would be. I passed by an almost invisible fuzzy object that I assumed was probably NGC 4697, a spiral galaxy with a bar crossing it. It may be a twin of our own Milky Way galaxy. But because the galaxy was just rising in the southeast I could hardly notice it. I searched a few fields to the north and west.
Suddenly it was there. It was an obvious, approximately 9.5 magnitude bright spot. I did not make out either tail, but the coma was there. And the comet smiled at me.
Of all my friends, Comet Atlas is by far the oldest. Not only is it older than I, but it may also be almost as old as our galaxy itself. Its age has been estimated at between 7.6 and just over 13 billion years old; if it is anywhere near that old it is older than our solar system and possibly as old as the galaxy itself. (Our galaxy is probably about 13.6 billion years old.) This comet was a leftover part of the birth of a solar system far away, maybe as far as a system on the other side of our galaxy. Wandering through empty space for possibly all these billions of long years, this comet carries with it the wisdom of much of our galaxy.
What it could teach us! But actually, it can offer us nothing. It may carry wisdom, but cannot utter a word of it, has no understanding, no knowledge. My live human friends and my family, for the brevity of their lives, offer much more salient hints, humor, and understanding of our lives and existence.
As Comet Atlas surges away out of our system, in my imagination it will witness the political world in which humanity lives. Our different beliefs and customs, legal interpretations, even our religious faiths, will lie layered upon its icy surface. Perhaps some day it will encounter another world, with intelligent life, and in its mind’s eye it would share what it has learned about us. But for a quarter of an hour on a mid-November morning, it was my friend.
There is an frivolous idea that the comet is not a comet but an alien spaceship. It is not but the idea is the subject of much humor these days. When I went inside and enjoyed a Star Trek Voyager episode before heading for bed at 0630 that morning, I imagined me and the comet trading jokesCnot the crew of the spaceship but the comet itself. I have studied comets since I was a teenager, and I imagine that each of the comets I have seen has had a cometary personality of some sort. Comet Atlas and I are friends, talking with each other, joking around, and celebrating our mutual love of the infinite space of which we both are a part. This, whether it be a comet or a human being, is what defines friendship.
Skyward is a contribution from DAS Poet Laureate, David “Doveed” Levy
