TIME VARIABLE COMA STRUCTURES IN COMET P SWIFT-TUTTLE/

B, V, R and IHW filter (CN, CO+, BC1 C-2) CCD imaging of comet P/Swift -Tuttle was performed from 28 October to 27 November 1992. Numerical a daptive Laplace filtering of the images revealed five types of coma fe atures: dust and gas jets from three sources on the nucleus, a dust fa n close to the Sun direction, brightness excess areas which partly coi ncided with the CN gas jets in the coma, and dust and ion tail streame rs partly superimposed on other coma features. A synodic rotation peri od of 2.795 days was determined by linear regression of two of the thr ee jet sources. The third source showed systematic deviations in the r esiduals between measured and calculated position angles which indicat e projection effects in the jet emission directions as seen from the E arth. The coma fan is interpreted as being due to a near-polar possibl y multiple activity region and thus may point close to the direction o f the projected nucleus rotation axis. The dust jet activity was conce ntrated to the sunward coma hemisphere with strong particle production over about 0.8 day of the rotation cycle, The CN gas emission of the jet sources remained almost continuously active over the whole nucleus rotation. The projected radial and lateral gas expansion velocities i n two of the three CN jets were derived (0.8 to 1.8 km/s with systemat ic variations over the rotation cycle). Our results for the rotation m otion of P/Swift-TuttIe is in agreement with those of Yoshida et al. ( 1993) and with Sekanina (1981) from the 1992 and 1862 apparitions, res pectively. Minor discrepancies in the derived periods and in the inter pretation of coma features are discussed.