Comets

According to Gary Kronk, "a comet is basically a ball of ice and dust. The typical comet is less than 10 kilometers across. Most of their time is spent frozen solid in the outer reaches of our solar system. At this point, the comet is nothing more than the nucleus. Except for a few suspected dead comets, and a couple of suspicious asteroids that occasionally show gas emissions like a comet, the nucleus is never really seen from Earth. By the time a comet becomes bright enough to be seen from our planet, it is usually exhibiting a coma"

Here are a few of the comets we've studied; of course there are many, many others. 

C/2002 Y1 (Juels-Holvorcem) -- Comet C/2002 Y1 (Juels-Holvorcem) was discovered on December 28th, 2002 by Charles W. Juels of Fountain Hills, AZ and Paulo R. Holvorcem of Campinas, Brazil while observing together in Arizona. 

C/2002 X5 Kudo-Fujikawa -- T. Kudo (Nishi Goshi-machi, Kikuchi-gun, Kumamoto-ken, Japan) discovered this comet within the constellation Boötes on 2002 December 13.83. He was using 20x125 binoculars.

C/2002 C1 Ikeya-Zhang -- This comet was discovered in the evening sky by three amateur astronomers on 2002 February 1. Kaoru Ikeya (Mori, Shuchi, Shizuoka, Japan) found the comet on February 1.41, while using a 25-cm reflector (39x).

C/2004 Q2 (Machholz) -- Discovered on August 27th, 2004 by Donald Machholz... bringing to 10 the number of comets found by this prolific comet hunter.

Be sure to visit Gary W. Kronk's Cometography Website for more info.