A comet that fell out of the Oort Cloud is soon to make its closest approach to Earth on Nov. 24, 2025.

But that’s not all. 

The comet is breaking apart by the minute. 

Discovered on May 24, 2025 by an asteroid-comet monitoring photometric system, Comet C-2025 ATLAS K-1 is making its first and likely last visit to our favorite star. 

It slowly brightened from magnitude 10 as it made its closest approach to the sun and drew within 31 million miles of the sun’s surface before whipping around and beginning its long exit from the solar system. 

Racing in toward perihelion, K-1 had one coma, or head. 

It was picked up again optically about two weeks past perihelion. Changes were taking place. 

For starters, the comet had a major event on Nov. 4, brightening to 0.9 magnitude. A fragment had evidently broken off the coma. Then another, and possibly another. 

I photographed K-1 on Nov. 14. The photo shows three distinct fragments visually reminding me, unfortunately, of the space shuttle Columbia’s demise in early February 2003. 

Four nights later, Gianluca Masi, an Italian astronomer who is a part of the Virtual Telescope Project, photographed K-1 with three major coma’s and a possible fourth. 

A cloudynights.com friend, Scott Smith of Tampa Bay Florida, used his SeeStar S50 to capture K-1 when it showed two and possibly three comas one night later on Nov. 19. 

On Friday, Nov. 21, I was up early and snapped this SeeStar image of 10th magnitude K-1 showing off three or four comas diverging from the main coma. 

This may not mean much, if anything, to John and Janice Public. But witnessing the rapid deterioration of a cosmic visiter that has traveled a light year or more to pass before our eyes is exciting beyond belief. 

As it approached the sun, solar plasma sublimated components of K-1 into a dust tail about 10-degrees long. After it wheeled around the sun, our star continued its fearsome tug at the body of K-1 and apparently succeeded in pulling apart K-1’s central coma, like it was taffy. 

Yum went the sun. 

On Nov. 24th, Monday night, K-1 will be within 12 degrees of the bright star Dubhe, one of the pointer stars of Ursa Major, the Big Dipper. In fact, K-1, assuming all or some of its components survive, will be a circumpolar constellation in the northern hemisphere for the foreseeable future. 

Let the Coma Counting begin!