The night skies above the Southern Hemisphere will host a rare visitor over the next two weeks. A glowing blue-green comet, believed to have originated in an icy region at the edge of the solar system, will swing over New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.
The comet — known as C/2025 R3 PANSTARRS — was discovered in 2025 and has slowly been making its journey past Earth. Last month, it was visible in the Northern Hemisphere for several weeks. Now, it’s time for stargazers in the Southern Hemisphere to see it.
The comet will be visible for about two weeks through a telescope, binoculars or camera lens before it decreases in brightness and fades away for tens of thousands of years.
Josh Aoraki, resident astronomer at Te Whatu Stardome in Auckland, New Zealand, said comets fall into one of two categories: short-period and long-period. The former is any comet that takes under 200 years to orbit the sun, like Halley’s comet (which will return in 2061).
Long-period comets, like C/2025 R3 PANSTARRS, take many more years to complete their journey. In this case, the comet may not return for another 170,000 years.
“Whenever we spot them, it’s the first time we’ve seen them, and it’s also the only time that we will see them in our lifetimes,” Mr. Aoraki said.
Although long-period comets are discovered each year, most can only be seen with specialized space telescopes, Mr. Aoraki said. Just a handful are visible through amateur telescopes and even fewer to the naked eye.
Astronomers believe the comet originated in a region called the Oort cloud, which lies beyond Pluto at the edge of the solar system and is made up of icy, comet-like objects. Many long-period comets come from this part of space.
For the past three nights, John Drummond, director of the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand’s comet section, has been watching the comet travel overhead.
“I enjoy looking at comets because they’re a moving body in a fairly static universe,” he said.
The best way to see the comet is to get away from any light pollution on a clear night and look to the west, near the constellation of Orion, Mr. Drummond said.
Warwick Anderson, a Canberra Astronomical Society committee member said the comet “will appear as a gray, fuzzy smudge in the sky.”
Yudish Ramanjooloo, a planetary defense junior researcher at the Pan-STARRS project at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy, was the first to spot the comet in September 2025.
“We mostly deal with asteroids and when we see something that’s unusual, it’s always a little exciting,” he said on Tuesday.
The jumble of numbers and letters in the comet’s name is a code, indicating what type of comet it is, when it was discovered and by whom, Mr. Ramanjooloo said.
Comets are essentially some of the “primordial building blocks” of the solar system, he said.
“They give us clues on what our solar system was like when they were first formed, and we can learn how that’s evolved over time,” he added.
