While this may not be the most esthetic image o Comet Halleythat you have ever seen, it is likely the most unique.The tiny cluster of pixels circled is th famouscomet along its orbit over4 billion (4,000,000,000) kilometers or 2 AUfrom the Sun - a record distance for a comet observation.Its last passage throug our neck of the woods in 1986 Comet Halleypresently cruises through the dim reaches of the outer solarsystem, almost as far away as outermost gas giant Neptune, and shows nosign of activity.Captured in March, this negative image is a composite ofdigital exposures made with threeof ESO's Very Large Telescopes.The exposures are registered on th moving comet, so thepicture shows background stars and galaxies as elongated smudges.An earth-orbiting satellite appears as a dark streak at the top CometHalley is clearly extremely faint here, but large earthboundtelescopes will be able to followit as it grows fainter still, reachingthe most distant point in its orbit, more than 5 billion kilometers(35 AU) from the Sun, in 2023.
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