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cometmay.txt
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1994-07-16
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PHOTO RELEASE NO.: STScI-PR94-26cFOR RELEASE: Thursday, July 7, 1994
HUBBLE'S PANORAMIC PICTURE OF COMET SHOEMAKER-LEVY 9
A NASA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image of comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9,
taken on May 17, 1994, with the Wide Field Planetary Camera-2 (WFPC-2) in
wide field mode.
When the comet was observed, its train of 21 icy fragments stretched across 710
thousand miles (1.1 million km) of space, or 3 times the distance between Earth
and the Moon. This required 6 WFPC exposures spaced along the comet train
to include all the nuclei. The image was taken in red light.
The comet was approximately 410 million miles (660 million km) from Earth
when the picture was taken, on a mid-July collision course with the gas giant
planet Jupiter.
Credit: H.A. Weaver, T. E. Smith (Space Telescope Science Institute), and
NASA