A NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day entry published on August 8, 2026, paired the diffuse greenish coma of periodic comet 10P/Tempel 2, at left, with a globular star cluster at right. The cluster is Messier 30, or M30, the 30th entry in 18th-century astronomer Charles Messier's catalogue of objects that were not comets.

The entry notes that Messier kept a list of objects that did not move from night to night against the background stars and so were not the comets he was hunting. Through his telescope, both the comet and the distant cluster would have appeared as similar faint, fuzzy objects.

The modern telescopic image was recorded on July 29. It shows Tempel 2 as it briefly swept close on the sky to M30. Though the comet's faint, narrow orbital dust trail appears to pierce the cluster, Tempel 2 was 3.5 light-minutes away, while Messier 30 is some 28,000 light-years distant. The image is credited to Dan Bartlett.