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Comet Don Quixote

Comet Don Quixote - NASA
Comet Don Quixote as photographed by the Spitzer Space Telescope

Named after the classic 17th century Spanish book, the celestial Don Quixote was initially believed to be a large asteroid in deep space. But with the help of the Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers discovered that what they initially believed was an asteroid was in fact a comet. The infrared imagery from Spitzer showed that Comet Don Quixote had the telltale features of a comet – a distinctive head and a (trailing) tail. In the above NASA pictures, the bright areas around Comet Don Quixote are stars and the horizontal line is from artifacts caused by image processing.

“Thou hast seen nothing yet.”
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

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