Hubble's Panoramic Picture of Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9

A NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image of comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9, taken on May 17, 1994, with the Wide Field Planetary Camera-2 (WFPC-2) in wide field mode.

When the comet was observed, its train of 21 icy fragments stretched across 710 thousand miles (1.1 million km) of space, or 3 times the distance between Earth and the Moon. This required 6 WFPC exposures spaced along the comet train to include all the nuclei. The image was taken in red light.