On November 19, 2025, NASA did a live webcast to share the hitherto unreleased cache of 3I/ATLAS images taken by several of its assets. Stargazers were expecting a better image of the interstellar object, but the HiRISE camera’s fuzzy snapshot broke the internet’s heart.
Meanwhile, citizen astronomers and astrophotographers kept sharing exocomet images that seemingly looked better than NASA’s media on the object. While the space agency cleared the air on the fuzziness of the image, the tinfoil hats have come out, and there’s no going back for the lay who maddeningly want 3I/ATLAS to be anything but a comet.
So far most images have clearly shown the tail and antitail of the exocomet. However, Canadian astrophotographer Paul Craggs’ recent images of 3I/ATLAS captured from Dwarf 3 (a portable smart telescope costing about Rs 44,000) seemingly break the illusion of cometary tail and anti-tail (?). Or is it so?
Captured 3I Atlas last night with my Dwarf 3.#3IATLAS pic.twitter.com/NPlbLfIHwI
— Paul Craggs (@craggs_paul) November 22, 2025
3I Atlas this morning! Clouds rolled in so couldn’t get more than a few pics with only 30 second exposure.#3IATLAS pic.twitter.com/dEpWwGahpR
— Paul Craggs (@craggs_paul) November 24, 2025
See Also: 3I/ATLAS: Harvard Astrophysicist Avi Loeb Explains If Exocomet’s Earth Flyby Before Christmas Means Doomsday
Wonder what Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has to say on the above visuals. Meanwhile, sharing another image of the comet, a user on X/Twitter remarked,
As the apparent magnitude continues to decline, some features like the tail and anti-tail will become more difficult for civilian assets to capture. Don’t let clickbaiters convince you it’s an “anomaly” or that they disappeared unexpectedly.
📷 11/24 3I/ATLAS IMAGE UPDATE 📷
Peter Carson captured this image using a remote observatory based in Extremadura, Spain.
As the apparent magnitude continues to decline, some features like the tail and anti-tail will become more difficult for civilian assets to capture. Don’t… pic.twitter.com/4I03k4eifw
— Drew Doss (@drew4worldruler) November 24, 2025
Avi Loeb, the Harvard researcher, on the other hand has so far enlisted 13 anomalies in 3I/ATLAS classifying them in three categories, namely, minor, medium, and major. The major six anomalies are something beyond simple explanation. Loeb speculates that the bizarre behavior of the comet shows that it is probably more than just a billion-year-old icy piece of dusty crag. The head of Project Galileo in his latest blog stated that
it is apparent that 3I/ATLAS is an extremely rare and mysterious object, especially if it happens to be a natural comet, as argued by NASA officials at the press conference on November 19, 2025.
In a recent interview, he elaborated
Remarkably, interstellar objects offer a new opportunity for both the search for primitive and technological lifeforms. We can land on an interstellar rock and return a sample of it to Earth, just as the OSIRIS-REx mission did with the asteroid Bennu. The returned sample may reveal the building blocks of life from another star. But in case the interstellar object happens to be a technological artifact, our learning opportunities would be far greater. The fundamental question after landing on a spacecraft with buttons on its surface would be whether to press any of these buttons.
He adds in his blog if we can shoot a signal at the object and expect a reply
Obviously, one can shoot a laser beam or some radar signal and wait for an answer, but I think it would be more informative for us to figure out remotely what it is by taking a lot of data of it with hundreds of ground-based telescopes and the Hubble and Webb telescopes as well.
See Also: 3I/ATLAS: NASA Explains Why The Fuzzy Interstellar Comet Picture By HiRISE As Amateurs Produce Better Pics
Cover: Paul Craggs