The near-nucleus environment in comet Hyakutake

This photo is a reproduction of a 5-second R-filtre CCD exposure obtained by Chris Lidman (ESO) and Olivier Le Fevre (Observatoire de Meudon, France) on UT March 15.3, 1996, with the EMMI Multimode Instrument on the ESO 3.5-m New Technology Telescope (NTT). It has been image-processed by Stefano Benetti at ESO-Santiago and Olivier Hainaut at the ESO HQ in Garching. This image displays the asymmetric components of the coma structure near the cometary nucleus. It shows a major dust jet emerging from the nucleus at 1 arcsec distance (250 km projected) in the North-East quadrant and turning counterclockwise a few arcsec (about 1000 km projected) further out. This is the first image to show evidence of such a well delimited jet this close to the nucleus.