Comet Hale Bopp dust jets

The porcupine appearance of the multiple dust jets very much resembles the coma structures in Comet Hale-Bopp that were observed in the second half of 1996. They may also be perceived as systematic irregularities in the isophote pattern of the V-filter image. While it is therefore obvious that the dust is not at all evenly distributed throughout the coma, the gaseous coma is rather symmetric. This is most likely caused by an omni-directional expansion of the gas that is released by the nucleus. This image was obtained by Hermann Boehnhardt (ESO) and Francois Colas (Bureau des Longitudes, Paris, France) using the ESO/MPG 2.2m telescope equipped with the EFOSC2 instrument. It represents a small subset of the science data collected on comet Hale-Bopp at ESO La Silla. On the photos that are shown here, the North and East directions are inclined 12 o clockwise of the top and left edge in the images, respectively.