Offered for no other reason than that images like this still blow my mind in the same way that pictures from the Apollo missions blew my mind as a bookish seven-year-old protogeek: Nasa’s Deep Impact probe managed to get some photos of Comet Hartley 2 from just over 400 miles away [via MetaFilter].
![Comet Hartley 2 as seen by Deep Impact [image courtesy NASA]](https://futurismic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/comet-hartley-2-deep-impact.jpg "Comet Hartley 2 as seen by Deep Impact [image courtesy NASA]")
The Universe == Awesome.
From the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy:
Spectacular outbursting comet 17P/Holmes exploded in size and brightness on October 24. It continues to expand and is now the largest single object in the Solar system, being bigger than the Sun (see above). The diameter of the tenuous dust atmosphere of the comet was measured at 1.4 million kilometers (0.9 million miles) on 2007 November 9 by Rachel Stevenson, Jan Kleyna and Pedro Lacerda of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy.