One of the greatest things about living in Teller County is our dark night sky.

This fall, the solar system set the stage for several astounding shows, some of which are once-in-a-lifetime events — or rather once in two hundred lifetimes to be more precise — and the drama in the night sky comes from comets.

Comets are non-planetary bodies that orbit the sun. Unlike asteroids which are made predominantly of rock and tend to have regular orbits within a belt between Mars and Jupiter, comets are icy wanderers — a composite of rock and ice — and they can have astonishingly irregular orbits. As comets travel closer to the sun, the ice begins to vaporize, giving comets their signature tail.

On Oct. 20, comet C/2025 R2 SWAN was at its peak brightness in the night sky and visible to the naked eye (though more clearly observed with binoculars or a telescope). Its trajectory has it moving away from the sun, so even though it will be visible into November, it will be less bright by the day. A long-period comet, Comet SWAN will not be visible from Earth again for 20,000 years.

The following day, comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon was at its brightest in our night sky. It too will be visible into November, and because its trajectory has it traversing our orbit, it should remain easier to spot though also less bright with each passing day as it continues on its 1,350-year journey around the sun.

To look for Comet SWAN, binoculars or a telescope are worth having handy. It will appear in the southwestern sky close to the horizon and is recognizable by its green glow and tail. Comet Lemmon can be found in the northern sky close to the horizon, and it too is green. Though Lemmon is the easiest of the two comets to spot without binoculars or a telescope, the visual aids improve the experience. Numerous websites and apps offer detailed guidance for finding these bodies.

If you are lucky enough to spot them, it is worth noting that Comet SWAN will pass Earth at a distance of 24 million miles as it exits the inner solar system, and Comet Lemmon will traverse our orbit at a distance of 56 million miles.

If searching the sky isn’t your cup of tea, then the Orionid meteor shower in the Constellation Orion requires little more than looking in the right direction and waiting for debris left behind by Haley’s Comet to streak across the sky. The Orionids are speedy little meteors. According to the American Meteorological Society, they move at a pace of 41 miles per second. Though the Orionids peaked in mid-October, they will continue through Nov. 12 with a frequency of 10-20 meteors per hour.

Often called the Halloween Fireballs, the Taurid meteor shower is slightly less active with around five meteors per hour. However, the show began in mid-September and will continue into the first week of December. Located in the Taurus constellation, the Northern and Southern Taurids are the debris field left behind by Comet Encke. To see them, look toward the Taurus constellation in the eastern sky from dark fall until midnight.

Though comets are not rare — there are millions of them in our solar system — most occupy the distant, trans-Neptune region far from the Sun and Earth. Some of those that do approach the inner solar system are to too small or faint to be observed or they disintegrate as they near the Sun.

Comets that are visible from Earth with the naked eye are quite rare. On average, a naked-eye-visible comet appears once every 5-10 years. The you-can’t-miss-it comets like Haley’s, Hale-Bopp and NEOWISE are even more rare. To have two comets in our sky at one time and as we pass through the debris fields of two others is truly remarkable.

Making the fall comet agenda even more interesting is the close approach of an extraordinarily rare interstellar comet which will pass just inside the orbit of Mars. Comet 3i/ATLAS is only the third known object from outside our solar system to enter our planetary neighborhood. Astronomers draw this conclusion due to ATLAS’s hyperbolic orbit which does not indicate a closed orbital path around our Sun.

Ground based telescopes were trained on the rare object as it made its approach in September. It is currently too close to the Sun to be observed but will reappear on the other side of the Sun in December allowing further observation by Astronomers and those with sufficient telescopes.