Hale Bopp

This splendid image [JPG; 26k] is a 'quick-look version' of the full scale image that is available at http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/bss/HB0315CO.html. It was obtained in the light of CO+ on March 15.5 UT. The banded structure in this high-pass filtered version near the nucleus is due to dust, but the complex, wavy outer structure is caused by CO+ ions being driven back into the tail by the solar wind magnetic field. The ion features change on a timescale of minutes. North is up, east to the left, and the field is about 350,000 km at the comet.

5 minutes exposure. Telescope guided on motion of comet during the exposure which accounts for star trails. The field of view is 0.3 degrees (long axis) by 0.2 degrees (short axis).
Second image was taken through a Lumicon Swann band filter and has been processed to reveal structure in the inner coma.

1 minute of exposure.

This is a 3 second exposure of Hale-Bopp's coma. Image has been flat fielded log scaled and sharpened.

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

1.5 min. of exposure. Streams and knots are well seen in both tails.

4 minutes of exposure.

5 minutes exposure, starting at 09:35 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.

10 minutes exposure.

6 minutes of exposure.The comet's coma was of magnitude - 0.6, with a naked eye visible ion tail of ~15 deg. and a diffuse dust tail of ~7 deg.

3 minutes of exposure.

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

2 minutes of exposure.

Field of view: 4.8 deg. x 3.2 deg.

RGB composite image. There are some ghost images in the upper right corner. North is up. 450 seconds of exposure.

2 minutes, tracked exposure.

35 seconds exposure. A Hale-Bopp observing session at Presque Isle Park turned into an impromptu public observing.