American Astronomical Society, Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2(784), p. L22, 2014
DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/784/2/l22
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Much anticipation and speculation were building around comet ISON, or C/2012 S1, discovered on 2012 September 21 by the International Scientific Optical Network telescope in Russia, and bound for the Sun on 2013 November 28, with a closest heliocentric approach distance of 2.7 R ☉. Here we present the first white light image of the comet's trail through the inner corona. The image was taken with a wide field Lyot-type coronagraph from the Mees Observatory on Haleakala at 19:12 UT, past its perihelion passage at 18:45 UT. The perfect match between the comet's trail captured in the inner corona and the trail that had persisted across the field of view of 2-6 R ☉ of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment/C2 coronagraph at 19:12 UT demonstrates that the comet survived its perihelion passage.