Hale Bopp

I have a new FJR German equatorial mount that I used for this photo on April 5th. I'm still refining my polar alignment of the new gadget. a faint aurora filled the sky at 10:30. I switched to my 50mm lens to get this shot featuring the red aurora borealis haze in the background.

Almost perfect conditions, but very cold and windy. Apparently, many people used this weekend-opportunity to get an excellent view of the comet. One person at this scene commented that this was the first night in a month with a clear sky. Not entirely correct, but the changing and bad weather has been somewhat frustrating over here. 15 seconds of exposure.

20 x 20 second exposures of Hale Bopp, taken through a blue filter have been combined and processed subtracting a 20 by 20 pixel masked version from 105% of the original image.

A view of Hale-Bopp over the Oahe (pronounced oh-WAH-he) Dam on the Missouri River upstream from Pierre, South Dakota. The earthen dam, which is nearly filled to the brim with spring runoff, is the second largest of its kind in the world, topped only by the Aswan Dam in Egypt.
30 second exposure at f 2.8 on Kodak 400 Gold film.

15 seconds of exposure.

10 seconds exposure unguided. This is an evening view of Comet Hale-Bopp over the Brooklyn Bridge. In the foreground is the East River. In the background are the Twin Towers.

10 seconds exposure unguided. This is an evening view of Comet Hale-Bopp over Lower Manhattan, taken from Brooklyn, New York. Visible in the photo are the East River in the foreground, the South Street Seaport at the lower right, and the Twin Towers in the center.

8X Panorama

Author: Dewey Vanderhoff
Location: Cody, Wyoming.
Optics:Nikon F2AS camera 35mm f/2.8 Nikkor lens.
Exposure: 60 seconds on Fuji Super G-800 color print film.

Eight 3 x 5 proof prints taped together and scanned in two sections to create a panorama of the entire Milky Way luminousity visble at the time from the north horizon to the southeast. Comet Hale-Bopp and the urban light polution of Cody WY are visible at right. The Decadent Astronomer's star camp is visible at left. The tripod's pseudo-polar axis was eyeballed towards the north galactic pole in Draco, then panned for each shot with plenty of overlap, and combined in Adobe Photoshop and removing the join lines. This was an interesting experiment I promise to develop further...

Darkman

Author: Dewey Vanderhoff
Location: Cody, Wyoming.
Optics:Nikon F2AS camera 35mm f/2.8 Nikkor lens.
Exposure: 52 seconds on Fuji Super G-800 color print film.

The photographer himself silhouetted against the urban light pollution of Cody Wyoming under Hale Bopp. The exposure was shuttered by his friend Mack Frost.

Hail! Hale Bopp

Author: Dewey Vanderhoff
Location: Cody, Wyoming.
Optics:Nikon F2AS camera 35mm f/2.8 Nikkor lens on Bogen tripod.
Exposure: 45 seconds on Fuji Super G-800 color print film.

Andy Frazier adds a human touch to this portrait of Hale Bopp...he was lit briefly with a bright Krypton bulb flashlight at f/8 for three seconds, then the lens was opened to f/ 2.8 for 45 seconds.

April Twilight

Author: Dewey Vanderhoff
Location: Cody, Wyoming.
Optics: Nikon F2AS camera 35mm f/2.8 Nikkor lens.
Exposure: 60 seconds on Fuji Super G-800 color print film.

A view of the northwest skyline of Cody, Wyoming showing the planet Mercury setting at lower left, Hale Bopp at upper center, and the lights of Cody and distant heart Mountain and more distant Beartooth Mountains at lower right. The message of this photo is: Don't just look at the Comet... the whole spring sky this year is wonderful!

Red Reflections

Author: Dewey Vanderhoff
Location: Cody, Wyoming.
Optics: 35mm f/2.8 Nikkor lens.
Exposure: Nikon F2AS camera 52 seconds on Fuji Super G-800 color print film.

My favorite Hale Bopp picture to date. It's a self portrait shuttered by Mack Frost for 52 seconds while I outline myself with a red filtered flashlight.

This false-color image was obtained by the Class of Astronomy (K12), with a little help, of course. The original 0.6 second exposure was filtered with LAIA, a program developed and distributed by the team GEA, at Barcelona. Three different channels were then summed with Paint Shop Pro:

• red channel, laplace filter, sigma 2 and radius 9,
• green channel, random contour filter #1 3 x 3
,
• blue channel, mean contour filter (12, 10 and -10).

piggybacked. Scanned from the negative

2 minutes exposure on Kodak ppf 400 film.

Every neighborhood ought to have skies like these throughout the year and each of us live in a house as bright and cheerful as this one.

Two images of the Hale Bopp comet taken on April 1, 1997.

The comet was of magnitude -0.9 with a naked eye visible ion tail of ~18 deg. and a diffuse dust tail of ~14 deg.

Exposure time of 4 minutes on PJM-2 film.

First image is a 20 second image through a red filter started at 00:30:00 has been processed using a rotational gradient filter with rotation 10 degrees and amplification 10.
Second image is a 20 second image through a blue filter started at 00:40:00 has been processed using a rank order masking technique; a 5x5 pixel mask with rank 60% and amplification 10 was used in this case.

This is a Composite of 70 -15 second exposures taken with an Apogee AP-7 CCD camera. The first exposure was taken on 04-01-97 at 01:00:58 UT. The images were enhanced to show the jets from the nucleus.