Comet C/2012 K1 – also known as comet PanSTARRS was photographed by the NEOWISE mission’s telescope while 230 million kilometers away from Earth. In this infrared image, the comet can be seen going through a much more distant spiral galaxy, called NGC 3726, which is about 55 million light-years from Earth, or 2 trillion times farther away from us than comet Pan-STARRS.
Every 76 years, the famous Halley’s Comet makes its way through the inner solar-system and is visible from Earth. This periodicity was first determined in 1705 by English astronomer Sir Edmond Halley, after whom the comet is named. This picture of Comet Halley (1P/Halley) was taken in 1986 which was its most recent foray into this part of our solar system. The European Space Agency space craft Giotto snapped this picture and became one of the first spacecraft ever to encounter and photograph the nucleus of a comet. Giotto was able to pass and image Halley’s nucleus as it receded from the Sun.
Since its discovery in 2012, Comet ISON (C/2012 S1) generated a lot of interest and intrigue before meeting its end at the hands of the Sun. It was named “ISON” after the organization where its discovery was made, using the initials of the Russian International Scientific Optical Network. The Hubble Space Telescope took this picture of Comet ISON in July 2013 as it was rocketing toward the Sun at a whopping speed of 48,000 mph. The comet itself was believed to be very cold thanks to an icy nucleus and a tail streaming copious amounts of gas and dust. It disintegrated into the Sun on December 1-2, 2013.
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
NASA’s Deep Space probe took this picture of Comet Tempel 1 (designation 9P/Tempel), which is a comet in the Jupiter system. It was taken by Deep Space probe’s impactor targeting sensor, about five minutes before it deliberately impacted/crashed with Comet Tempel 1. This comet is relatively small in size, 7.6 km × 4.9 km in diameter and has a rotational period of 40.7 hours.
