Friday, December 23, 2011

Reason #95: Lovejoy



Behold Comet Lovejoy as it careens toward Sarah Palin's house flies past the Earth yesterday.

Two neat things about this picture - how clearly you can see the different strata of Earth's atmosphere at the bottom, and how you can see two different tails at the top. The dust tail is the more curved one, whereas the ion tail, which aligns with the Sun's magnetic field, is straighter. Most comet photographs aren't clear enough to discern the two like that.

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