The telescope was set to track accurately the comet's motion - this went very well, demonstrating the excellent performance of the telescope optics, mechanics and control system, already at this early stage of the commissioning phase. It was located in a dense star field in the southern constellation Sagittarius. The white lines are the trailed images of background stars in the field. The total integration time is 96 min. The field of view is about 16 x 16 arcsec 2 .
North is up and east is left.
In order to improve the image quality, the twelve individual 8-min exposures were combined. It is the first clear image ever obtained of the Rosetta target at this great distance, i.e. showing the nucleus as it will be when the encounter with the spacecraft takes place. A team of ESO astronomers has performed a careful analysis of the new images. It leads to several important conclusions, of great value for the Rosetta planners. If the reflectivity is higher, the nucleus will be correspondingly smaller.