In some cases these stars are seen through the comet's coma. The lack of curvature of the dust jets is suggestive of a large spin period. The coma shown in this enhanced image extends about 400,000 km from the nucleus. The ring structures present are artifacts caused by the enhancement technique and are due to stars in the field. The sun makes an angle of about 20 degrees with the line of sight and is on the same side as the earth.
North is to the left and east is to the bottom.
This image was taken by Beatrice Mueller and the image enhancement was done by Nalin Samarasinha . The image shows the comet with several different dust jets clearly visible. The sunward direction is roughly toward the top of the image. At the time this 600s image was taken, the comet was just over 3 AU from the Sun and 2.9 AU from the Earth. The brightness of this comet, while still far away from the Sun, is an indication that this comet is large compared to most comets.