Things Nobody Alive Has Ever Seen

Two sights arrived within a week of each other, and both of them have the same strange quality: nobody alive on Earth has ever seen them before. Not this crew. Not this comet. And in one case, not anyone for 170,000 years.

Artemis II splashed down in the Pacific on Friday, closing out the first crewed trip to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen spent roughly ten days aboard the Orion capsule Integrity. They didn't land. They didn't orbit. They looped once around the far side of the Moon, took several thousand photographs, and came home. On paper that sounds modest. In practice it is the furthest any human has ever been from Earth: 252,760 miles at the peak, beating a record Apollo 13 set in 1970 under rather worse circumstances.

The lunar flyby itself lasted about seven hours. During that window the crew worked from a list of 30 surface targets assigned by NASA's lunar science team, things like the Orientale basin (a 600-mile impact crater nearly four billion years old) and Hertzsprung, an older, battered ringed basin on the far side. They described what they were seeing in real time to scientists on the ground: the colour of the regolith, the texture of lava plains, subtle ridges and fractures. They spotted six meteoroid impact flashes on the darkened lunar surface, little pinpricks of light that will now be cross-referenced with amateur observations made from Earth at the same moment.

And then, as they rounded back toward Earth, something happened that no astronaut has ever witnessed: a total solar eclipse seen from deep space. The spacecraft, the Moon, and the Sun lined up. From the crew's vantage point the Moon appeared roughly five times larger than the Sun, which meant totality lasted nearly 54 minutes. On Earth, a total solar eclipse tops out at around seven and a half minutes, and that's once in a lifetime. The Artemis II crew had almost an hour of it. During totality they could see stars that the Moon's brightness normally washes out. They could see the solar corona, the Sun's wispy outer atmosphere, hanging as a halo around a dark disc. Earthshine, sunlight bouncing off our planet and back onto the Moon, faintly lit the lunar nightside.

I keep coming back to those 54 minutes. Eclipse chasers spend decades and small fortunes travelling the world for a few minutes of totality. These four people had nearly an hour, in silence, from a place where the stars don't twinkle.

A visitor that last came by 170,000 years ago

While Orion was still in the lunar sphere of influence, a much older traveller was making its own approach. Comet C/2025 R3 (PanSTARRS) was picked up in September 2025 by the Pan-STARRS survey on the Haleakalā volcano in Hawaii. At the time it was a faint smudge around magnitude 20, nothing to get excited about. Six months later it is brightening faster than anyone predicted. As of April 11 observers began catching it with the naked eye, and its ion tail now stretches more than ten degrees across the sky, the width of your fist held at arm's length.

The comet hits perihelion, its closest pass to the Sun, on April 19. It then sweeps around and makes its closest approach to Earth on April 26, at 73 million kilometres. For the next week or so the best time to look is about 90 minutes before dawn, low in the east, near the Great Square of Pegasus. On April 14 there's a bonus: a slender crescent Moon and Mercury hang nearby.

Here's the part that stops me. C/2025 R3 is a long-period comet on a hyperbolic orbit, which means it almost certainly came from the Oort Cloud, the deep-space reservoir of icy leftovers from when the solar system formed. Its orbit brings it in roughly once every 170,000 years. Last time this thing crossed the inner solar system, there were no cities. No farms. No writing. Neanderthals were still sharing Europe with early Homo sapiens. The great cave paintings of Lascaux were more than a hundred thousand years in the future.

And after this pass, C/2025 R3 is done. Its outbound trajectory is ejecting it from the solar system entirely. It will never be back. Whoever sees it over the next two weeks is the first and last audience this object will ever have.

Talking about this with your kids

Find a window with a view of the eastern sky. Before bed, work out where the Sun will rise tomorrow morning, then imagine a fist-sized patch of sky just above and to the left of that spot. That's roughly where the comet is. If someone in your family is an early riser, 90 minutes before sunrise on a clear morning is worth a try, ideally with binoculars.

Then ask the kids this: if a comet only comes back every 170,000 years, and the last time it was here there were mammoths walking around, who do they think will be here next time? What will they look like? Will they even be on Earth? There's no right answer. The question is the point.