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                           Astronomy Picture of the Day   
      
       Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our   
         fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation   
                       written by a professional astronomer.   
      
                                 2025 December 26   
      
                                  3I/ATLAS Flyby   
                      Image Credit & Copyright: Dan Bartlett   
      
      Explanation: Attention grabbing interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS made its   
      not-so-close flyby of our fair planet on December 19 at a distance of   
      1.8 astronomical units. That's about 900 light-seconds. Still, this   
      deep exposure captures the comet from another star system as it gently   
      swept across a faint background of stars in the constellation Leo about   
      4 days earlier, on the night of December 15. Though faint, colors   
      emphasized in the image data, show off the comet's yellowish dust tail   
      and bluish ion tail along with a greenish tinged coma. And even while   
      scrutinized by arrays of telescopes and spacecraft from planet Earth,   
      3I ATLAS is headed out of the Solar System. It's presently moving   
      outward along a hyperbolic trajectory at about 64 kilometers per second   
      relative to the Sun, too fast to be bound the Sun's gravity.   
      
                       Tomorrow's picture: Apollo's Moonship   
        __________________________________________________________________   
      
          Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)   
               NASA Official: Amber Straughn Specific rights apply.   
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                         A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC,   
                              NASA Science Activation   
                                & Michigan Tech. U.   
      
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