Comet Lovejoy
© NAOJ with data processing by Masafumi Yagi (NAOJ)Comet C/2013 R1 (Lovejoy) imaged by the Subaru Telescope on Dec. 3.
Comet ISON may be no more than just a cloud of icy debris these days but there's another comet that's showing off in the morning sky: C/2013 R1 (Lovejoy), which was discovered in September and is steadily nearing its Christmas Day perihelion. In the early hours of Dec. 3, astronomers using the 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii captured this amazing image of Lovejoy, revealing the intricate flows of ion streamers in its tail. (Click here for a higher resolution of the image above.)

According to a news story on the NAOJ website:
At the time of this observation, at around 5:30 am on December 3, 2013 (Hawaii Standard Time), Comet Lovejoy was 50 million miles (80 million km) distant from Earth and 80 million miles (130 million km) away from the Sun.

The entire image of comet Lovejoy was made with the Subaru Telescope's Suprime-Cam, which uses a mosaic of ten 2048 x 4096 CCDs covering a 34′ x 27′ field of view and a pixel scale of 0.2".

"Subaru Telescope offers a rare combination of large telescope aperture and a wide-field camera," said a member of the observation team, which included astronomers from Stony Brook University in New York, Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Johns Hopkins University, and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. "This enabled us to capture a detailed look at the nucleus while also photogenically framing inner portions of Comet Lovejoy's impressive ion tail."
Comet Lovejoy is currently visible in the early morning sky as a naked-eye object in the northern hemisphere.

Comet Lovejoy_1
© Spaceweather.comWhere to find comet Lovejoy in the morning sky, Dec. 7.
Read more about Lovejoy's journey through the inner solar system in this article by Bob King here.

Comet Lovejoy_2
© Flickr/Willo2173Image of comet Lovejoy on Dec. 5 by Flickr user Willo2173.
Image
© Gerald Rhemann