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When I began with the Sungrazer Project,
we had less than a thousand comets.

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That was over 20 years ago.

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So, the fact that we’ve finally reached this
milestone – 5,000 comets –

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it’s just unbelievable to me.

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Sungrazer Project is a project that allows anyone

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anywhere in the world to sit down
with a laptop and discover comets.

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The clue to what a sungrazing comet
is kind of in the name there:

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it's literally a comet
that grazes by the Sun.

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The Sungrazer Project relies
exclusively on images of the Sun

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from spacecraft.
And the images that we discover

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nearly all of our comets in come from

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the Solar and Heliospheric 
Observatory, or SOHO.

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That is a satellite
that was launched in 1995.

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So, it's been operating
for a long time now.

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3, 2, 1 –

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ignition and liftoff!

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Of SOHO and the Atlas vehicle

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on an international mission 
of solar physics.

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Our participants go to 
the SOHO website

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where we have all of our latest
images from the spacecraft.

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And they download those images.

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And it's really as simple as looking
through them, flicking through the images

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and looking for something

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tiny and faint and moving
in a different direction to the stars.

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Discovering a comet is a

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very unique feeling.

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You have this realization that suddenly
you've found a piece of the solar system,

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a piece of the universe
that no one has ever seen before.

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Prior to the launch of the SOHO mission
and the Sungrazer Project,

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there were only a couple of dozen
sungrazing comets on record.

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That's all we knew existed.

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The 5,000-comet
milestone is a huge achievement.

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It’s one that none of us dreamed
we would even get to.

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So, simply the statistics of 5,000 comets
and looking at their orbits

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and trajectories through space 
is a super unique dataset.

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It's a really valuable science, and it is
just a testament to the countless hours

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the project participants
have put into this.

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We absolutely would not 
under any circumstance be here

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if it wasn't for what
our project volunteers have done.

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That's really what 5,000 comets represents.

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It's 20 or more years of invaluable
discoveries from the project volunteers.