The European arm of the Hubble Space Telescope coordinating facility has just released a new image of the weird Comet 17/P Holmes, taken on November 4, almost two weeks after the comet suddenly expelled a huge quantity of dust (as usual, click the image to embiggen):
The color image is a deep ground-based observation, and the grayscale one is from Hubble (note the scale bar; Hubble could see details as small as 54 km across). Some things are obvious immediately from the picture. There is a lot more dust along the horizontal axis then the vertical; that's why it looks like a funny vertical bow-tie. There is about twice as much dust horizontally (east/west) than vertically (north/south). That means the dust was expelled in a preferred direction, and not isotropically, that is, in all directions like an expanding spherical shell. Even nearly two weeks after the outburst, the nucleus was ...
