File:Shoemaker-Levy 9 on 1994-05-17.png

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Description

A NASA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, taken on May 17, 1994, with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) in wide field mode.

When the comet was observed, its train of 21 icy fragments stretched across 1.1 million km (710 thousand miles) 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 660 million km (410 million miles) from Earth when the picture was taken, on a mid-July collision course with the gas giant planet Jupiter.

Date

17 May 1994

Source

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1994/26/image/c/ (direct link)

Author

NASA, ESA, and H. Weaver and E. Smith (STScI)

Permission
(Reusing this file)

This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. NASA Hubble material (and ESA Hubble material prior to 2009) is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA is credited as the source of the material. This license does not apply if ESA material created after 2008 or source material from other organizations is in use.
The material was created for NASA by Space Telescope Science Institute under Contract NAS5-26555, or for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre. Copyright statement at hubblesite.org or 2008 copyright statement at spacetelescope.org. For material created by the European Space Agency on the spacetelescope.org site since 2009, use the {{ESA-Hubble}} tag.

File history

Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time.

	Date/Time	Dimensions	User	Comment
current	09:21, 26 September 2012	2,775 × 839 (138 KB)	McZusatz	used lossless tif
	10:22, 1 February 2010	2,775 × 839 (49 KB)	Tryphon	Higher resolution, from http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/images/hs-1994-26-c-full_jpg.jpg.
	23:06, 30 March 2007	1,017 × 307 (31 KB)	Tene~commonswiki	Optimised (0)
	13:05, 24 May 2005	1,017 × 307 (34 KB)	Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason	cropped
	13:04, 24 May 2005	1,024 × 480 (47 KB)	Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason	NASA image of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 {{PD-USGov-NASA}} From: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/sl9/image2.html PHOTO RELEASE NO.: STScI-PR94-26c<br> FOR RELEASE: Thursday, July 7, 1994<br> HUBBLE'S PANORAMIC PICTURE OF COMET SHOEMAKER-LEVY 9 A NASA Hubble Space