Comet Hale-Bopp

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope picture of comet Hale-Bopp shows a remarkable "pinwheel" pattern and a blob of free-flying debris near the nucleus. The bright clump of light along the spiral (above the nucleus, which is near the center of the frame) may be a piece of the comet's icy crust that was ejected into space by a combination of ice evaporation and the comet's rotation, and which then disintegrated into a bright cloud of particles.

This full-field picture, taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (in WF mode), shows the comet against a stellar backdrop in the constellation Sagittarius.