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(meteorobs) An *optical* photograph of a comet's dust trail ...
... can be seen at www.astro.uni-bonndot de/~dfischer/news/pics/497gross.jpg -
it shows 22P/Kopff on Feb. 14 this year and was taken with the Kibo 105 cm
Schmidt by Ishiguro & al., Astrophys. J. Lett. 572 [June 10, 2002] L117-20.
The authors make the case that this cannot be tail (the comet was at 3 AU
from the Sun) but must be a dust trail of cm-sized dust particles that
Kopff shed during the last perihelion passage 5.6 years earlier - the
very phenomenon that we get our meteor storms from when the Earth hits one.
This is apparently the first clear optical picture of such a trail. What
the authors do not discuss in their brief paper is why one can see this
phenomenon in the optical only in this comet (because of its short orbit?) -
and whether one can learn something about the 3D structure of dust trails
from this kind of observations, improving meteor storm predictions.
Dan
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