Key Observations
- The latest image exposes a structure never documented at this scale.
- Its direction and speed defy standard comet physics.
- With Earth’s close approach days away, the stakes are rising.
A new image reveals a sunward structure so vast it challenges everything scientists expect from a natural comet
By Samuel Lopez | USA Herald – At 02:28:12 UTC on December 15, 2025, a 0.25-meter telescope in Calabria, Italy, operated by astrophotographer Toni Scarmato, captured an image of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS that immediately stood apart from everything seen before. Processed using a Larson–Sekanina rotational gradient filter, the image revealed not just the familiar dust and gas envelope expected of a comet, but a massive sunward anti-tail extending outward to roughly half a million kilometers from the nucleus—larger than the average distance between Earth and the Moon.
I reviewed both the raw and processed frames, paying particular attention to orientation, scaling, and consistency across exposures. The anti-tail is not a visual artifact, not a background star smear, and not a projection illusion. It persists across multiple frames and aligns precisely in the sunward direction, toward the lower left of the image. The mapped field of view spans approximately 0.86 by 0.39 million kilometers, placing the structure firmly in physical space, not in the realm of image-processing anomalies.
