Right now, to the most powerful space telescope, it's just a faint speck of dust in the dark sky, but when it crosses Earth's atmosphere later this year, comet ISON will be like nothing we've seen in the most recent history.
Some are unabashedly calling it the "comet of the century", and the Hubble Space Telescope has captured the first glimpses of it. The powerful telescope snapped the comet at a head-spinning distance of 394 million miles from Earth (386 million miles from the Sun).
Astronomers say that by November, when ISON will be reaching us, it will be as bright as the Moon in the sky.
With the Hubble data, astronomers have calculated that the comet measures anything from 3 to 4 miles wide. However, the gas and dust filled coma surrounding the ISON's nucleus stretches out approximately 3.100 miles in diameter, that is, wider than the Australian continent.
The new Hubble picture also clearly reveals the comet's ghostly dust tail pointing away from the Sun, extending more than 57,000 miles. This iconic, ethereal feature of all comets form as a result of surface material being ejected at high speeds into space.
According to the National Geographic, as comet ISON heads towards the Sun over the next few months, the frozen surface of the nucleus will continue to warm up and melt.
The Sun's heat evaporates ices in the nucleus into jets of gases and dust, forming the snowball-like coma - which, by the way, is slowly getting denser and wider as the comet approaches the Sun.
Scientists subscribe to the theory that this is ISON's first trip into the inner solar system, coming from the far outer reaches of the solar system, from a frozen reservoir of billions of hibernating comets.
