Inner Coma Imaging of Comet Levy (1990c) with the Hubble Space Telescope

Abstract

Observations of comet Levy (1990c) were carried out with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) on UT 27 Sep 1990. At that time, both the heliocentric and geocentric distances were ~1 AU. The comet was imaged with the Wide Field Camera (WFC) through both red and blue filters, which were selected to isolate continuum emission peaking sharply at the nucleus. Each WFC pixel is 0."1 on a side, corresponding to 78 km at the comet. The longest exposures (4 sec) through the red filter had sufficient signal to noise that image deconvolution could be used to recover virtually the full spatial resolution of HST.

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