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J.T.T Mäkinen (Finnish Meteorological Institute), J.-L. Bertaux, E. Quémerais (Service d'Aéronomie, France), E. Kyrölä, W. Schmidt (Finnish Meteorological Institute), R. Lallement (Service d'Aéronomie, France)
The SWAN instrument on board the SOHO spacecraft is a scanning Lyman-\alpha imager capable of covering the entire sky on a daily basis. Comets whose extended neutral hydrogen envelope resonantly scatters solar Lyman-\alpha light can be detected from the SWAN full sky maps down to an approximate total visual magnitude of 11.
In addition to the synoptic full sky observations, SWAN conducts specific observations of bright comets with enhanced spatial resolution and photometric sensitivity. The promising comet 2000 WM1 was taken into the observing program from the beginning of November 2001 and was tracked throughout the perihelion. We present the analysis of all SWAN observations of C/2000 WM1 with derived water production rates around the perihelion passage including the January outburst.
The work of J.T.T. Mäkinen is funded by the Academy of Finland. The attendance of J.T.T. Mäkinen to the 34th DPS Meeting is funded by the Vilho, Yrjö, and Kalle Väisälä Fund.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34, #3< br> © 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.