Very little is known about how outgassing regions are distributed over the nucleus of comets. In periodic comets, active regions are believed to be few and of small extent. Since periodic comets are notorious for their lack of (small) solid particles that efficiently scatter sunlight, we try to find traces of the existence of production sites by examining the morphology of the gas coma. We use a new coma model in which results from hydrodynamics calculations describing the inner coma are used as limit conditions for a collisionless description of the outer coma. The production pattern of the parent species mainly depends on the extent and location of the production region(s) and on the rotational state of the nucleus. Analyzing 1980 observations of comet 2P/Encke, we find that free emission from a single, small, active region located near the subsolar point of a nonrotating nucleus is excluded. But such an active region on a rotating nucleus produces well the observed coma morphology. Our data then allow us to determine the orientation of the comet spin axis and the cometocentric latitude of the source. Emission from a few small production regions spread over the sunward part of a nonrotating nucleus or emission at a very low rate from a larger subsolar area could also fit the data. Although we do not find a unique solution to our problem, the excellent quality of our fits indicates that our approach, if used with enough care, can provide a new tool to investigate the properties of comet nuclei when the coma is far from spherically symmetric and, ultimately, to study the effects of the nongravitational force that is acting on comet nuclei.
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