How Robyn MacRae captured this image of The Great Comet of 2025

The Great Comet of 2025 was discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) as it sped ­towards the inner solar system. One woman was ready to capture this rare event.

Comet over Green Hills State Forest. Picture: Robyn MacRae

Robyn MacRae wanted to capture an image of C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) – or the Great Comet of 2025, as it is rather more poetically known – so in January this year, just as the comet was swinging by the sun, she and a couple of friends drove out to Green Hills State Forest near Tumut in NSW in search of dark skies.

This isolated pine plantation is a “pretty spooky” place at night, she says, and when the lights of another car ­appeared, driving down a forest track towards them, they all clenched slightly. But it turned out to be a neighbour from town, who’d also driven out to this spot to see the celestial lightshow. It’s the tail lights of his car painting the foreground red in this intriguing image, a finalist in the Galah Regional Photography Prize.

MacRae and her husband, a former navy man, moved with their three kids to Tumut, in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains, 20-odd years ago. Around the same time, she quit her career in magazines and embarked on a teaching degree. These days she works at the TAFE in town, teaching photography to adults and a special education program to kids. And outside of work, she’s a portrait photographer who has made the finals of the National Photographic Portrait Prize and the Olive Cotton Awards, among others, over the years.

The Great Comet of 2025 was discovered in April last year by the Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) as it sped ­towards the inner solar system on its highly elliptical orbit. It is believed to have partially disintegrated as it swung by the sun – a comet is just a big dirty snowball, after all – and what remains of it is now headed back to the dark, cold woop-woop of the outer solar system.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for a reappearance: if it ever returns, it’ll be 600,000 years hence, ­according to astronomers’ calculations.