Giotto's encounter with Halley's comet

Filed under pretty pictures, animation, amateur image processing, comets, comet Halley, comet Halley armada

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Giotto's HMC images of Halley's comet, captured on March 13 and 14, 1986, were complicated by the fact that its camera was a line-scanning or "pushbroom" instrument, while the spacecraft rotated. Near closest approach, the spacecraft took 74-pixel-wide images in rapid succession until the spacecraft suffered too much damage from Halley's debris.

ESA / Giotto project, H. U. Keller / animation by Daniel Macháček / stabilized by Gordan Ugarkovic

Copyright holder: Daniel Macháček

Copyright holder: Gordan Ugarkovic

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder. Original image data dated on or about March 14, 1986