Comet C/2025 R3 (PANSTARRS) Views | Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has captured views of Comet C/2025 R3 PANSTARRS in-between the Sun and Earth. In the SOHO satellite's LASCO C3 imagery, Comet C/2025 R3 PanSTARRS emerges from the right edge of the frame.
C/2025 R3 (PanSTARRS) is a hyperbolic Oort cloud comet. It passed perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) on April 19, 2026, when it was 0.499 AU (75 million km) from the Sun. The comet was discovered by PanSTARRS in images obtained on September 8, 2025.
SOHO is a European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft that has discovered over 5,000 comets. SOHO was launched in 1995 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center. It began science operations in May 1996. It is a joint project between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA. The Large Angle and Spectrometric COronagraph (LASCO) instrument is one of 11 instruments. The LASCO instrument is a set of three coronagraphs that image the solar corona from 1.1 to 32 solar radii. It is convenient to measure distances in terms of solar radii. One solar radius is about 700,000 km, 420,000 miles or 16 arc minutes. A coronagraph is a telescope that is designed to block light coming from the solar disk, in order to see the extremely faint emissions from the region around the sun, called the corona.
The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) located at Haleakala Observatory, Hawaii, USA, consists of astronomical cameras, telescopes and a computing facility that is surveying the sky for moving or variable objects on a continual basis, and also producing accurate astrometry and photometry of already-detected objects. The Pan-STARRS Project is a collaboration between the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Maui High Performance Computing Center and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). The NASA Near Earth Object Observation Program is the main funder for the operation of the Pan-STARRS telescopes.
Capture Dates: April 23-26, 2026
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