Hale Bopp

Sharing the sky with moon light and sunset, the aurora borealis started its show late April 10th with a colorful cloud that rose in the south and then drifted north to light up Cook Inlet.

15-second exposure on Kodak PPF-400 Professional color negative film, unguided.

2 minutes exposure on Kodak PPF-400 Professional color negative film.

1 minute exposure.

Barcelona lies beside Mediterranean sea and is circled by several hills that outline it's skyline. Foster's Tower was built during the years preceding the Olimpic Games of Barcelona'92. We planned a comet-hunting session that night from a parking lot that is near this communications tower. The place is not dark, but it is not too far and about 500 meters high: that's much better than sea level. It wasn't easy to drive down Barcelona's streets that evening. The local football team played a semifinal match against Fiorentina at Camp Nou. That means a huge traffic jam many kilometers around the stadium.
Well... actually, the comet is NOT visible in this image. Only Sirius and Orion can be seen, and comet Hale-Bopp was at Perseus that night.
(click here for a better version)

Hale-Bopps's tail was covering Algol (Beta persei) and pointing towards Mirfak (Alfa persei). The Moon, at left, was only three days old, but it is overexposed. Eight hours later, it passed half a degree north of Aldebaran (Alfa tauri), the bright star over it.

This image is quite the same, but with a better lens and a shorter exposure. The view through binoculars (my sight is not quite good) almost knocked my socks off: moon's horns seemed to be prolonged by Taurus' horns (Hyades). Open cluster M45 (Pleiades) is halfway the Moon and comet Hale-Bopp, over the trees.
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These images show comet Hale-Bopp over the left foot of Perseus. A plane caused the dashed line in the first one. Open cluster M45 (Pleiades) is at left. Exposure time was about one minute long, tracked with a home-made equatorial mount driven by a clock.
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This image shows only part of the original print. The exposure was tracked with a home-made equatorial mount driven by a clock. The alignment wasn't quite good and the tripod is not quite stable (more challenge!). Despite all, the comet can be seen! (well... part of it).
Stay tuned: I promise an image of the engine next week.

A comparison between Comet Hyakutake and Hale Bopp at the same date in the same region of Perseus.

Here are the photos, as promised, of the wonderful moving conjunction of the Mir space station and Hale-Bopp on the evening of Tuesday April 8 as seen from a site ten miles east of cody WY at 10:15 PM

My friend Andy Frazier and myself had set up at Eagle Pass shortly after 8 PM to view the first of two visible illuminated passes of MIR that evening, where the 100-ton station and its newly docked Progress M-35 supply ship waltzed over us to the north at an elevation of 65.3 degrees.

Then we waited and comet watched and took in the conjunction of a 39-hour old crescent Moon andthe planet Mercury in the low northwest sky below Hale-Bopp. Ninety minutes after the first pass, MIR came around again...it was still illuminated some two hours after local sunset. At the time it was passing over eastern Washington state, the Idaho panhandle, and on up into British Columbia and Alberta some 535 miles distant when these images were taken.

Although still illuminated by the Sun, the phase angle and distance to MIR were such that it seemed to be a fast moving magnitude 4 or 5 star. However, we had no trouble locking in on it.

I use two valuable little shareware programs to determine MIR's location and time of appearance. The first is OrbitTak 2.1.5 from BEK Developers of Florida (for Macintosh... $10.00... download at www.shareware.com ) which is an excellent satellite plotting program. I get NASA 2-line orbital elements from various sources, all derived from NASA/Spacecom daily postings to stay current with over 125 satellite's worth of orbital parameters, including MIR. What you end up with is a clean graphic of the night sky from your location and viewing angles, with MIR's orbit laid in and time-ticked for 1-minute intervals. Last night It showed the comet going by Hale-Bopp's nucleus at a distance of roughly one-half a degree, and by the gods that's exactly what it did at the appointed moment!

The photo says it all. The first is a "normal" view of the scene with landscape, looking back west towards Cody Wy from Eagle Pass some ten miles distant. The second inage is cropped and histogram-enhanced in Photoshop 3.0.5 to emphasize the MIR trail.

The third image, "...Two Mercurys..." is a tongue-in-cheek thing. We also observed and photographed the lovely conjunction of Mercury and the new crescent Moon. Andy drives a Mercury Villager minivan, so it seemed like the metaphorical thing to do to photograph a "Two Mercury" starscape.

I lit his van with a high-powered Krypton bulb flashlight filtered to approximate daylight with a blue 80-B photographer's studio gel. I took meter reading off his running lights and the flashlight beam to develop an exposure for "painting" in the vehicle.

The scene was photograhed for 40 seconds at f/ 2.8 on Fuji Super G 800 film using a Nikon F2AS camera with a Nikkor 35mm f/ 2.0 lens The car got four seconds of exposure from the flashlight from 100 feet away, and I had Andy click on his lights for one second to add that illumination. The point of light off his front bumper is a car on distant US highway 14-16-20 coming from Cody , whose urban light pollution is visible in the distance.

It is remarkable enough to be able to use my Macintosh technology to predict the various apparitions of MIR , LANDSAT, the Shuttle et ux , which I've been doing for about six months now. But this orbital serendipity of MIR traversing the Comet'Head is magical. It then becomes just a case of applying the Old Photographer's Axiom for getting a great photo , to wit :

"F/ 2.8 and Be There !

1 minute exposure on Kodak ppf 400 film.

Author: Ian Griffin
Location: Astronaut Memorial Planetarium & Observatory, Cocoa (Florida)
Optics: Maksutov 12" f/5 telescope and SBIG ST8 camera.

The jets of Hale Bopp: The image above was obtained from 25 x 20 second exposures of Hale Bopp, taken through a blue filter, combined and processed subtracting a masked version (5 x 5 pixel) from 105% of the original image.

The other two images show the activity for April 3rd-6th

We had a great run of comet hunting last night. The caretaker of the Old Trail Town frontier museum on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming allowed us to shoot photos from within the ghost town buildings. It was an absolutely clear night; a storm pulling off left behind a crisp sky.

Using a combination of existing light from high powered sodium vapor lamps on the next property, and our own enhanced lighting tools, we lit the rustic old frontier buildings beneath Hale-Bopp and the star fields. Normally, sodium lamps are a photographer's curse ( the monochromatic light cannot be filtered or color balanced ) , but on the old weathered wood of the Trail Town buildings it added a golden patina.

The photos were scanned from handprinted 8 x 10 color glossies with little correction in Photoshop , except to remove a greeenish cast in some shadow zones, owing to a vagrant mercury vapor lamp shining in from a nearby trailer court...aaarrrggghh!!!.

Exposures were in the 25- 45 second range at apertures from f/ 2.0 to f/4.0 and we lit parts of the scene with a powerful flashlight filtered with studio gel filters to convert tungsten color back towards daylight. The buildings were "painted" with the light using 4 second brush strokes, exposure determined with a Minolta-IV incident light meter.

Special thanks to Terry Edgar, caretaker of Old Trail Town in Cody for allowing us access to the museum, normally closed during winter. Trail Town is a magical collection of genuine old West buildings and memorabilia by any reckoning, but at night with a comet hovering nearby, some of the romance and majesty of the West is recaptured in very visual metaphors.

Hale-Bopp is spectacular in these images.

This image was obtained at the Amtsgymnasiet i Sondebørg of Denmark by the Astronomy Class (age 16-18).

5 minutes of exposure from the highest hill side on the Island of Als, "Hawk-Mountain". Sky conditions perfect, but icy cold winds. Notice the open star cluster Messier 34 to the upper left of the comet's nucleus, (position 10 o'clock). extremely dark sky. .

25 x 20 second exposures of Hale Bopp, taken through a blue filter have been combined and processed subtracting a masked version (5 x 5 pixel for the first image and a 20 x 20 pixel for the second image) from 105% of the original image.

L'Hospitalet is a satellite town of Barcelona. It shares with its big brother the same urban problems: heavy pollution (of any kind). This image was taken from a 13th floor, high above most of the neighbour buildings, on an abnormal evening of (almost) clear skies. The street at bottom right is Rambla Just Oliveras. Cornella's and Sant Just's buildings can be seen in the skiline. I covered the lens partially during 25 of the 40 seconds exposure, to avoid overexposing the bottom part.

This image was taken from a 13th floor at l'Hospitalet. Some clouds started to veil the western horizon. They eclipsed the comet 30 minutes later. I covered the lens partially during 30 of the 45 seconds exposure, to avoid overexposing the bottom part.
(click here for a bigger version)

High resolution image (313K)