A newly discovered comet is visible in the morning sky this month if you know where to look — and if you have a bit of help.

The celestial object, named Comet C/2025 F2 (SWAN), was discovered by an amateur Australian astronomer.

To see the comet yourself, you’ll want to head outside just before dawn and look toward the northeast horizon, said Kelly Lepo, an education and outreach scientist at the Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute.

It should be visible in the mornings until about April 14. But the comet is too faint to see with just your eyes, Lepo said.

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“If you have a pair of binoculars for birding or a small telescope sitting around, now’s the time to pull it out and use it,” she said.

The comet will look like “a fuzzy dot” if you use binoculars to view it, Lepo said. Images of SWAN that show it with a tail have been captured with long-exposure photography by people across the globe.

After April 14, there is a chance the comet will be destroyed by the sun. By April 14, the comet may pass too close to the horizon to be visible in the morning.

On May 1, it will get within 31 million miles of the sun, according to EarthSky.org. That means it will be just slightly closer to the sun than Mercury’s average orbit.

If the comet — which Lepo described as “basically dirty snowballs” — survives its approach to the sun, it will transition to sunset viewing in the Northern Hemisphere, and could be brighter than it is right now.

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The comet was discovered using data from the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), an instrument launched in 1995 that studies the sun. Lepo said that since the sun causes so much light to reflect off comets as they get closer, the SOHO is quite effective at comet hunting. It has detected some 5,000 comets as of 2024, she said.

“This is not something it was designed to do. It was designed to look at the Sun. But it’s kind of a comet-finding machine,” she added.

Discovering a dirty snowball like Comet C/2025 F2 (SWAN), though, is a bit more rare. Lepo said SOHO finding a comet that is observable for a backyard astronomer is “kind of a once every couple years event.”

If you miss the comet, there are some astronomical events this year to look forward to, including the annual Perseid meteor shower in August and three “supermoons” — where the moon appears brighter and larger than normal —this fall or winter.