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Bruce Murray Space Image Library

ISON approaches the Sun as seen from STEREO-A (Nov 21-26, 2013)

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This animation is composed of 208 images captured over a period of five days from November 21 to November 26 as comet ISON approached the Sun. Also in the frame are Mercury, Earth, and comet Encke.

Images downloaded from here.

Here is a version of the animation aligned on the comet:

ISON approaches the Sun as seen from STEREO-A (Nov 21-28, 2013)
ISON approaches the Sun as seen from STEREO-A (Nov 21-28, 2013) This animation contains 264 images captured by the STEREO Ahead spacecraft between November 20 at 14:05 and November 28 at 1:29 UTC. The two vertical lines that cross the image are pixel bleeding from two bright planets (Mercury and Earth), both out of the frame. The smaller comet that appears to cross ISON's path is Encke. As ISON gets very close to the Sun it gets so bright that it saturates the detector, blooming into vertical stripes. Those aren't real; they represent charge spilling over into adjacent pixels from the too-bright comet.Image: NASA / STEREO / Emily Lakdawalla