July 4, 2013 – SPACE - The Comet ISON shines like a cosmic skyrocket in a new video from the Hubble Space Telescope as the icy wanderer, which some astronomers have billed as a potential “comet of the century,” streaks through our solar system at a staggering 48,000 mph. The new Comet ISON video, which NASA released Tuesday (July 2), is a time-lapse view created from images of the comet obtained using the Hubble telescope on May 8. At the time, the comet was about 403 million miles (648 million kilometers) from Earth and crossing between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. NASA officials likened the comet’s extreme speed to a skyrocket on the Fourth of July. “The movie shows a sequence of Hubble observations taken over a 43-minute span and compresses this into just five seconds,” NASA officials explained in a video description. “The comet travels 34,000 miles in this brief video, or 7 percent of the distance between Earth and the moon. The deep-space visitor streaks silently against the background stars.” The blue hue of ISON in the new video is actually a false-color view of the comet as it appeared through the Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope. Comet ISON was discovered by amateur astronomers in September 2012 and is headed for a close encounter with the sun in late November of this year.
http://news.yahoo.com/hubble-telescope-snaps-comet-century-fireworks-video-201615533.html