A CACKHANDED attempt to take a selfie with her daughter may have resulted in Reeny Fernandes capturing the last moments of a comet before it was destroyed by the sun.

The school administration assistant was picking strawberries with her family out at Lotmead Farm yesterday when she snapped the sky by accident. It wasn’t until she went through her pictures later that she spotted the bright ball of light.

Reeny, from Gorse Hill, had stopped to take a snap with daughter Ivanka, eight, with her Samsung Galaxy S6, when she fumbled it. She said: “The mobile just slipped in my hand and clicked on the sky.”

“It was only when I got back into the car and was looking at the pictures that I had clicked that I saw it,” she told the Advertiser.

“My son was coming up with all sorts of things, saying it was a space ship. At first I thought it was the moon, but then I saw it had a tail behind it.”

Later, when she told her mum about it she was stunned to be told there had been news reports about a comet flying too close to the sun and being vapourised. A quick search on the internet confirmed it.

Reeny, who works at Holy Cross Primary School, said: “I was so excited. I said: ‘I think I’ve got something amazing that I’ve captured unknowingly.’”

The comet’s fiery death dive was seen and recorded by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which was launched by NASA and the European Space Agency in 1995.

It was first spotted on August 1 and footage shows it hurtling towards the sun at almost 373 miles per second before it is torn apart.

The comet was part of the Kreutz group of comets, which are fragments of a much larger one that was broken up thousands of years ago. They follow an orbit that takes 800 years and passes within 850,000 miles of the surface of the sun.

Comets that pass so close to the sun are known as sungrazers. Usually between 30 to 150 feet in diameter, they are useful to scientists because their tails of ionised gas light up the magnetic fields around the sun. The tails also show the movement of the solar winds.