The prime object of study is comet Hale-Bopp, for which large numbers of optical and infrared CCD images were obtained. Additional objects may be added, depending on appropriate data becoming available in the course of this investigation. The purpose of morphological studies is too establish the pattern of dust emission from the nucleus, which is determined by the surface distribution of discrete sources of dust on the rotating nucleus and their temporal evolution. Completion of morphological analysis is a prerequisite for photometry both in the optical wavelengths and in the thermal infrared.
Morphological analysis has two major steps.
The second step of the morphological analysis is the modelling of the observed dust features in terms of the dust-source distribution on the rotating nucleus and its temporal evolution. The main part of this modelling is a Monte Carlo simulation code that generates synthetic images of the dust coma for any chosen time. The emission sources are characterized by their locations on the nuclear surface and by their dust production rates. The nucleus is assumed to rotate along a spin axis and to have a particular spin rate. When upgraded, the code will offer simultaneous synthetic images of the dust coma in the optical and thermal-infrared regions of the spectrum.