Comet ISON

At the time of the Hubble observations on October 9, 2013, the comet was 1.49 astronomical units (139 million miles) from the Sun. The comet was 1.91 astronomical units (177 million miles) from Earth.

The image was created from Hubble data from proposal 13229 by the Hubble Heritage Team, PI: Z. Levay, M. Mutchler, C. Christian, L. Frattare, W. Januszewski, M. Livio, J. Mack, and J. Sokol (STScI/AURA), and K. Noll (NASA/GSFC).

High-level science products for these data are available from the MAST archive at http://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/ison.

F438W (B) and F775W (i')

NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI/AURA)

This image is a composite of separate exposures acquired by the WFC3/UVIS instrument. Several filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic (grayscale) image associated with an individual filter. In this case, the assigned colors are:

Blue/green: F438W (B) and
Orange: F775W (i')