Briefly: the PUNCH mission to monitor the Sun states that they are still tracking interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, even though the small body has passed “behind” the Sun (as seen from Earth). In other words, ‘solar conjunction’:
bsky.app/profile/kwalsh4a.bsky.social/post/3m2rnxlgigs2v
“While 3I Atlas is getting to harder to see from Earth, heliospheric
images in space are still tracking. Here is a movie from PUNCH
tracking it yesterday (8-October).”
The video depicts the spinning ‘PUNCH field of view’. PUNCH is actually a constellation of four Sun-watching spacecraft, in Earth orbit. As the individual platforms turn around our planet, they assemble a continuous movie of the Sun and surrounding space, by piecing together the images from each separate point of view. The resulting movie is then ‘despun’- fixed on the Sun as a reference, not on the framing by the individual images.
ATLAS will emerge from solar conjuction later this year, and be visible in conventional telescopes again.