The spectacular Comet Pan-STARRS emerged in the western sunset sky, last week, and could be seen with the naked eye in parts of the Northern Hemisphere.
Before dipping inside Mercury's orbit, the comet passed within 100 million miles of Earth. We humans had our sights set on capturing its entrancing journey. So far we've seen photos and a black-and-white video capturing the comet, Earth and Mercury together. However new footage from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory gives us a better view of the commotion the comet caused at the doorstep of our planet.
The video above is a compilation of photos captured by the Heliospheric Imager (HI), an instrument that looks to the side of the sun to watch coronal mass ejections (giant bursts of solar wind and magnetic fields). As Comet Pan-STARRS flew around the sun from March 10 to 15, HI took three images and stitched them together.
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