Astrophotographers capture night sky full of satellites as comet passes Earth

By Dean Murray

A shocking image shows how the night sky is being crowded by satellites .

Astrophotographers observing Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) have captured striking evidence of how rapidly Earth’s near-space environment is being polluted by artificial satellites.

The team at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in Tenerife used 135mm full-frame imaging equipment at the Teide Observatory to document the comet in October.

While their long-exposure photographs showed Lemmon’s spectacular ion tail stretching more than 13 degrees across the sky, they also revealed another, less welcome phenomenon — the bright streaks left by passing satellites.

According to the IAC, repeated exposures taken over a little more than half an hour recorded more than 1,600 visible trails, rep