C/2021 A1 (Leonard) was a long period comet that was discovered by G. J. Leonard at the Mount Lemmon Observatory on 3 January 2021 (a year before perihelion) when the comet was 5 AU(750 million km) from the Sun. It had a retrograde orbit. The nucleus was about 1 km (0.6 miles) across. It came within 4 million km (2.5 million mi) of Venus, the closest-known cometary approach to Venus.