Comet C/2021 A1 (Leonard) continues to display moderately decent visibility in the southwest in late December. Here we see the comet with a faintly visible tail pointed to the upper left in the constellation Microscopium. Even at this normal (non-telephoto) image scale, we can see that the comet's head displays the green coloration arising from electrons in diatomic carbon molecules falling from higher energy levels back to their base level after UV radiation excites the electrons to higher levels. Unannotated image |