Why Is Comet ISON Green?

By Nancy Atkinson October 24, 2013
Why Is Comet ISON Green?

Your readers may appreciate knowing why comets can appear this color. The background image is the shot I took with my 12.5" and an ST10xme CCD camera for 20 minutes in mid-October. A pale coloration of the front of the coma is seen. To the lower left is a shot with the same instrument but with a 100 lpmm (line pair per millimeter) diffraction grating in front of the CCD chip to break out the spectra of the objects in the entire field. Here ISON is faintly seen to the left of center, and the first order spectra a band to its right. But the real answer comes when we use the software called Rspec to analyze this band of light. The result is on the lower right. Normally reflected sunlight is rather flat and bland, and mostly that is what ISON is right now, reflected from dust. But labeled are two humps in the blue and green parts of the spectrum labeled "C2" for a carbon molecule. This blue/green emission pair is what gives ISON the color.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com