Hale Bopp

The comet's coma was of magnitude -0.5, with a naked eye visible ion tail of ~15 deg. and a diffuse dust tail of ~6 deg.

Wide-field (3.8 x 2.5 degrees) false-color image taken in the light of singly-ionized water ions. Exposure time was 5 minutes.

Wide-field (9.7 x 6.5 degrees) false-color image taken at 10.170UT (start) in the light of singly-ionized water ions. Exposure time was 5 minutes.

The inner part of the coma was saturated in order to observe the tail.

5 minutes exposure, starting at 09:50 UT. The field of view is 0.3 degrees (long axis) by 0.2 degrees (short axis). The image has been processed using Mira. A 40 by 40 median filtered masked image was substracted from 105% of the original first image. Second one has been flat fielded and dark substracted.

26 and 15 minutes of exposure. These images are undoubtedly among the most impressive so far obtained of this comet. Note in particular the wide-angle photo with the Milky Way in the background.

This false color image of Hale-Bopp is a composite of 27 -30 second exposures taken with an Apogee AP-7 CCD. The first exposure was taken on 03-09-97 at 10:16:29 UT, the last exposure was taken 10:32:51. The images were enhanced to show the jets from the nucleus.

This image, taken at the beginning of twilight, is not quite good, but is the only one I could take using a home-made equatorial device powered by an alarm clock and sticking plaster. The lab did its best to get a print light and soft, looking like a diurnal photograph. They can't understand that the sky is darker at night. Then, once scanned, I rescued what I could. It would have been a nice photo showing both tails over the Milky Way, at Cygnus.

The field of view is about 5x3.5 deg.

This false color image of Hale-Bopp is a composite of 30 -30 second exposures taken with an Apogee AP-7 CCD. The first exposure was taken on 03-16-97 at 10:21:52 UT, the last exposure was taken 10:49:52. The images were enhanced to show the jets from the nucleus.

The meteor is a satellite trail.

This photo was taken from Hintereisferner, a place 3020m high.

This is a 10 second exposure of Hale-Bopp's coma on 8th march 1997 at 09:08 U.T. It was incredible, I've never seen that. Image has been flat fielded and log scaled.

4 minutes exposure. On this image we can see Deneb and NGC7000. At the end of the tail can be seen open cluster M39.

5 minutes exposure, starting at 09:50 UT. The field of view is 0.3 degrees (long axis) by 0.2 degrees (short axis). The image has been processed using Mira. A 40 by 40 median filtered masked image was substracted from 105% of the original first image. Second one has been flat fielded and dark substracted.

The comet's coma was of magnitude -0.3, with a naked eye visible ion tail of ~12 deg. and a diffuse dust tail of ~6 deg.

60 seconds exposure on a 1024x1024 CCD camera. The field of view is 2.4 x 2.4 degrees. The inner part of the coma was saturated in order to observe the tail. North is up, West is to the right.

35-seconds exposure. I was shocked at how observable the comet was since my last nightime excursion on Feb. 25. and how BRIGHT the comet now was. The first image is just after sunset, the lights of Marquette, MI visible across a large frozen bay of Lake Superior.