Swift-Tuttle was okay though. I think it was that one in the early 90s. Visible with the naked eye as having two tails.
NASA deep space probe sends back video of 'Comet of the Century'
NASA's Deep Impact probe has sent back images of comet Ison as it heads inexorably towards a close fly-past of the Sun later this year. The spacecraft snapped the comet from a whopping 793 million kilometres with its Medium-Resolution Imager over a 36-hour period on 17 and 18 January, allowing NASA to stitch together this time …
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Thursday 7th February 2013 00:33 GMT Androgynous Crackwhore
Re: "Hopefully there wont be to many idiots with this one."
On 28 November, Ison will pass within 1.8 million kilometres of the Sun, coming to within 64 million kilometres of Earth on 26 December.
I'm inclined to think that the crackpots will be in raptures.
All aboard for another pop at the second coming.
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Wednesday 6th February 2013 22:05 GMT Mike Flugennock
re: Hale-Bopp and Heaven's Gate
Actually, that whole episode turned out to have been a big misunderstanding.
Apparently, the cult was right about aliens coming to take them off of Earth, but the cult members misheard the message. They thought the aliens were saying "wait for the comet Hale-Bopp", when the actual message was "wait for the comment 'Hail Bob!' "
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Wednesday 6th February 2013 15:28 GMT jai
poor FX
that looks like a scene from the worst of cheap B-Movies from the 40s!!!!
surely NASA can do better than that, at least some kind of post-processing to clear up the noise on the images.
Or are they afraid that presenting a too-clean image will incite everyone to claim it's as fake as the moon landings?
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Wednesday 6th February 2013 21:12 GMT Joe Cooper
Re: poor FX
It's maybe a 10 year old digital camera connected to a computer from the 90s, trained on a radically far, small and dim target.
If you expect it to look any better, it's your ignorance talking.
Can NASA make it look better? Yes, for barrels and barrels of money, by sending a new, purpose-built probe to the object in question.
Instead they did the fiscally responsible thing; use an asset they have that still works to get pictures good enough to be useful.
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Thursday 7th February 2013 11:30 GMT Joe Cooper
Re: poor FX
"Only because they are forced too after blowing $100 billion on a space station they can't even get to on their own. A fool tends to be thrifty after he is parted from his money."
The HSF program is mandated from on high (Congress) and explicitly designed to cost a lot without looking too cool.
Can't piss on them for that.
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Friday 8th February 2013 16:56 GMT jai
Re: poor FX
Can NASA make it look better? Yes, for barrels and barrels of money
while my original comment was made somewhat tongue in cheek, what i meant was, couldn't they run the video through a filter to remove all the noise and speckles? that wouldn't cost barrels and barrels of money, i'm sure something as simple and free as iMovie can both remove camera shake and despeckle the video image.
it's like they left all that in, to purposely make it look like it was a poor video sent from the middle of space.
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Wednesday 6th February 2013 15:43 GMT Tom_
Re: Cloud cover....
Closest approach to the sun is in November and apparently it might remain visible until January. If that's so it ought to give even us in the UK a chance to see it.
Of course nobody knows if it will just get burnt up by the sun yet, so closest approach might be final approach too.
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Wednesday 6th February 2013 21:57 GMT Mike Flugennock
"...as we previously put it..."
"so spectacular that it may achieve a brightness of an apparent magnitude of -16, which would greatly outshine the brightest Moon", as we previously put it...
...or, as the Drudge Report will put it:
IT'S COMING RIGHT FOR US!!!
...in 72-point bold, with a still from the movie Deep Impact of the giant asteroid plowing into the Earth.
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Thursday 7th February 2013 00:08 GMT Simon Harris
Names have been changed to protect the innocent...
It took me ages to find any up-to-date information on Deep Impact until I discovered that once its primary mission was over, they changed the mission name to EPOXI.
This is the website that is most relevent now: http://epoxi.umd.edu/.
I don't think the page http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/deepimpact/index.cfm quoted in the article has been updated much since the end of the primary mission.