It seems Halloween had a visitor from beyond our solar system. Astronomers at Arizona’s Lowell Observatory managed to snap what’s believed to be the first optical image of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS after its fiery swing around the Sun — a cosmic trick-or-treater caught on camera by the 4.3-metre Discovery Telescope. Qicheng Zhang, a postdoctoral fellow at the observatory, subsequently showed that the comet is also visible through small amateur instruments across much of the Northern Hemisphere, posting an example on his Cometary blog on Sunday (November 2). “All you need is a clear sky and a very low eastern horizon,” Zhang told Live Science on Friday. “It won’t look very impressive, it’s just a smudge, but it will be an increasingly visible smudge over the next few days.” Discove

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