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Emily Lakdawalla • Nov 04, 2010

Animation of the five closest-approach Hartley 2 images

Those of you who follow my blog must have known this was coming: now that I got all five new Deep Impact images of Comet Hartley 2 posted and explained, I had to make an animation. Here they are. I rotated them all counterclockwise by a quarter turn and aligned the frames, but otherwise did no processing.

Animation of Deep Impact close-approach images of Hartley 2
Animation of Deep Impact close-approach images of Hartley 2 About an hour after its closest approach of Hartley 2, Deep Impact downlinked five precious images taken during the nearest part of its flyby. The top two images were taken 82 and 16 seconds before closest approach, and the bottom three 18, 57, and 117 seconds after closest approach (image times are 13:58:07, 13:59:13, 13:59:47, 14:00:26, and 14:01:26 UTC on November 4, 2010). They show a very active comet with numerous jets.Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UMD / animation by Emily Lakdawalla

See my previous post for analysis of these images!

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