C/2001 A2 LINEAR - July 15, 2001 UT

^ Original ST6 30-second image taken at 9:03 July 15, 2001 UT.
FOV = 6.8 arc-minutes across. A tail is barely visible stretching to lower right corner.

^ Using a histogram stretch reveals the full extent of the coma.
A galaxy, PGC 68502, magnitude 15.6(P) appears on left.

^ Here a posterizing filter is applied to the image to model the
shape of the brightness variations.

^ Further image processing reveals the T-shape first observed (I believe) by Gianluca Masi from Italy a few days prior to this shot.

^ A detail of the nucleus shows no sign of fragmentation. Each pixel
is about 1 arc-second across.

All images on this page were made from one image frame. The differences are results of image processing using AIP4Win, by Richard Berry and James Burnell.

At the telescope: Steve Brewster, Sara Martin,
Ted Nichols II, John Rogers, and Pam Sable.

A further discovery was made when I compared this image with one taken at Palomar in 1954 during the Palomar Sky Survey, click here...

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