On October 28, 2025, I found myself on Lycabettus Hill in Athens, watching the sun set over the city.
I had arrived in Athens two days earlier and planned to spend three days exploring the city.
Since many museums and archaeological sites had free entry that day, I had already spent hours walking through ancient places like the Temple of Hephaestus, the Roman Agora and Hadrian’s Library. The Acropolis, however, was completely packed and by the time I looked for tickets, there were none left. So instead of going up to the Acropolis, I decided to watch the sunset from above.
At first, I had considered going to Philopappos Hill but in the end I chose Lycabettus Hill for the view. I arrived just before sunset, only to find the platform already crowded with tourists. There was barely any space left, so I went back down a few steps and found a small spot on the staircase, where I could sit for a while with my feet hanging over the edge and the city spread out below me.
From there, I watched Athens slowly turn golden, then blue, then glittering with city lights. The Acropolis lit up in the distance and for a while I just enjoyed the view, took photos and made a timelapse of the sunset.
Once most of the tourists had left and the sky had grown darker, I set up my Dwarf 3 on the stairs and pointed it toward Comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon. I honestly wasn’t sure how much would be possible from the middle of such a bright city, but the result surprised me. Lemmon was already quite low in the sky, yet the comet showed up clearly – even with some structure in the tail.
That alone would have made the evening worth it.
But then I tried one more target: Comet C/2025 R2 SWAN. SWAN was much fainter than Lemmon and had already passed its best observing window, so I didn’t expect too much. And yes, compared to Lemmon it was more of a small greenish smudge than a dramatic comet portrait but it was there.
Two comets, photographed in one night, from a staircase on Lycabettus Hill, above one of the brightest cities I have ever tried to image from.
The images were captured with the DWARF 3 using several 15-second exposures, stacked in Siril, with background extraction and denoising in GraXpert. The final editing was made in Affinity Photo.