A comet last seen from our planet 80,000 years ago has been spotted streaking across the Surrey night sky.

Known as Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS it was at its closest to Earth, at some 44 million miles, on 12 October, the day it was photographed by John Axtell, a renowned local astronomer and member of both Woking Photographic Society and Guildford Astronomical Society.

His photographs were taken from the water meadows alongside the Wey Navigation between Ripley and Pyrford, near where he lives.

The comet appeared low in the western sky shortly after sunset, and it will remain visible in our skies for a few more weeks, rising higher each day as it moves away from the Sun and back into the depths of the solar system.

John said: “Comets are icy, dusty remnants of the formation of the solar system, building blocks that didn’t get used.

“They usually live in either the Kupier Belt [a similar distance from the Sun as the dwarf planet Pluto] or much further away in the Oort Cloud.

“Occasionally they can drift in towards the Sun which heats them up, and they brighten and grow a tail, which is dust pushed away by the Sun’s solar wind – the same wind that brought us the solar material that caused last week’s aurora.”

Witnessing the comet really is a once in a lifetime experience: by early next month it will have gone again for another 80,000 years.