Comet Blazes from a Galaxy Far, Far Away in Hubble Pix; `Comet of the Century' May Be Just as Spectacular to the Naked Eye by November

Comet ISON blazed from a faraway galaxy in a new picture from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The comet blazes in the middle of a deep-space photograph. The Comet ISON will light up this sky at the end of November when it passes through earth’s solar system. Comet ISON will approach the sun until it is at its closest point on Nov. 28. The comet will only be 724,000 miles above the surface of the sun. Researchers say the comet should blaze as brightly as a full moon.

The image of the comet was assembled by researchers who put together five pictures of Comet ISON that were taken on April 30. The picture shows the comet blazing against a backdrop of bright stars and galaxies.

In a post last week, Josh Sokol of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., wrote “The result is part science, part art. It's a simulation of what our eyes, with their ability to dynamically adjust to brighter and fainter objects, would see if we could look up at the heavens with the resolution of Hubble.”

The Space Telescope Science Institute operates the Hubble telescope.

Researcher explained that the pictures were taken by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 UVIS instrument. Three exposures were made with a filter that transmits yellow and green light, which shows up as blue in the picture. Two of the pictures two used a filter that allows red and some near-infrared light.

Sokol wrote, "In general, redder things are older, more evolved, than blue things — this is true both for the crosshair-spiked stars and the smudges of distant galaxies."

Comet ISON is being called the "comet of the century." Comets are made up of the building blocks that came together to form the planets 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists are looking forward to studying the material that ISON leaves in its aftermath is it approaches the sun.