Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) at its closest approach to the Earth

Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) was observed at ESO (La Silla) for three consecutive nights at the beginning of May, 2004 at its closest approach to Earth. The observations consisted of quasi-simultaneous multi-wavelength exposures in the visible, near-IR and thermal-IR in order to study different properties of the solid component that are responsible for the scattering and emission of radiation in different spectral ranges. The comet was observed with the 3.6m telescope, equipped with TIMMI2 for the thermal-IR region, the NTT, equipped with EMMI and SOFI for the visible and near-IR regions. Narrow band images and long slit spectra were recorded for each spectral region. In the near-IR range, polarimetric observations were also performed during the last night. The aim of the observations was the characterization of the solid component at small scalelength to search for possible short lifetime organic components, as those found in the comet C/2000 WM1 (Tozzi et al., 2004, A&A, 424, 235), dust fragmentation etc.. Here we report preliminary results of the analysis of these observations.