This is without a doubt my most well-planned astrophoto to date, involving days of planning and preparation to build the slightly hodgepodge rig that would capture this beautiful but faint comet briefly visiting the NZ skies. For just 30 minutes I was able to see and photograph the comet before it disappeared into the clouds and then below the horizon. C/2024 G3 is a non-periodic comet, which is thought to originate from the Oort cloud. From initial orbital measurements, it was assumed that there was only a small chance that it would survive its perihelion of just 0.09 AU on 13/01/25, but it was later discovered that the comet was dynamically old, so had survived many previous encounters. Just 6 days after this however, it was discovered that the comet has indeed broken up, likely due to jetting and out-gassing of the nucleus as it was heated up by solar radiation. The comet has retained the tail structure, but there is now no nucleus (as can be seen from the image)!
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