A few hours ago I got the first original comet images in FITS format, taken on August 1 (many thanks to Karl Battams, STEREO team member). Several frames was damaged, but the team believes that will solve this problem at the next session. I stacked all images by the comet movement, this has increase the singnal/noise ratio, see the comet with more “details”.So, the first results. The comet has grown. Now the diameter of it’s outer coma exceeded 200,000 km! Of course, at this time we have only low resolution images, but they still allow us to estimateits current size. I want to remind you that the outer coma, it’s very discharged gas envelope, not the nucleus itself, estimates of the nucleus size has not changed. On the left picture you can see the comet itself, as well as the angular size of the Sun, if it was located at the same distance as comet. Impressive?
The first image of the comet Elenin from the spacecraft was received on July 22, by SWAN instrument (Solar Wind Anisotropies), installed on the SOHO space solar observatory. The comet was detected on the images from July 22 by Vladimir Bezugly.
Image resolution is small, but comet is visible in the coordinates - 160 0 (slightly right from the center of image). Images taken at distance about 240,000,000 km (1.6 AU). I would like to remind you, that two days later, comet C/2010 X1 (Elenin) will be in 32 times closer to the other spacecraft - STEREO-B.
[/caption]More pictures of older photos of ELENIN and the one above
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