Miloslav Druckmüller¹, Shadia Rifai Habbal², Peter Aniol^3,4, Adalbert Ding⁵ and Huw Morgan⁶

¹Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Brno University of Technology, 616 69 Brno, Czech Republic
²Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, Honolulu 96822, Hawaii, USA
³ASTELCO Systems GmbH, D-82152 Martinsried, Germany
⁴KACCOLR, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 22254, Saudi Arabia
⁵Institute of Optics and Atomic Physics, Technische Universitaet Berlin, and Institute of Technical Physics, Berlin, Germany
⁶Institute of Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science, Aberystwyth University, Ceredigion, Cymru SY23 3BZ, UK

Much anticipation and speculation were building around comet ISON, or C/2012 S1, discovered on 2012 September 21 by the International Scientific Optical Network telescope in Russia, and bound for the Sun on 2013 November 28, with a closest heliocentric approach distance of 2.7 R_☉. Here we present the first white light image of the comet’s trail through the inner corona. The image was taken with a wide field Lyot-type coronagraph from the Mees Observatory on Haleakala at 19:12 UT, past its perihelion passage at 18:45 UT. The perfect match between the comet’s trail captured in the inner corona and the trail that had persisted across the field of view of 2-6 R_☉ of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment/C2 coronagraph at 19:12 UT demonstrates that the comet survived its perihelion passage.

Reference
Druckmüller M, Habbal SR, Aniol P, Ding A and Morgan H (2014) Imaging Comet ISON C/2012 S1 in the Inner Corona at Perihelion. The Astrophysical Journal – Letters 784:L22.
[doi:10.1088/2041-8205/784/2/L22]

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