Sixty-nine days before it gets up-close-and-personal with a comet, NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft successfully photographed its quarry, Comet 9P/Tempel 1, at a distance of about 60 million kilometres. The image, taken on 25 April 2005, is the first of many comet portraits Deep Impact will take leading up to its historic comet encounter on 4 July.
At the distance of the comet, each pixel is about 600 km across, so the coma is quite extensive. This was a great milestone for the project. Although many images of the comet have been taken by Earth-based observers, including amateurs, this was the first one taken by the spacecraft. In this orientation, north is at the bottom and east is on the right.