The Hale-Bopp Comet, continued...

Here's a 5 second exposure through my 6" telescope. Because it's such a short exposure, we can't see much of the tail. I did not have tracking on this telescope at this time, so I was unable to do a longer exposure (because of blurring due to the Earth's rotation). I was hoping to capture the elusive 3- 4 bands at the front of the comet that can be seen with my telescope, but apparently they were too faint to register on film.

This photo was taken on the same night as the above shot, but with tracking through an 8" Mead, which belongs to a friend of mine. This is a 3 minute exposure on Fuji HG 800 film at prime focus with an effective f/6.3. Exposing for about 50 times as long allows us to see much more of the tail. We would need darker skies and still longer exposures to capture the blue ion tail clearly in a telescope photo.

These photos have been heavily compressed with JPEG to reduce size and download time. The originals are much more dramatic.

Parting Shot

Here we have my final shot. This is an enlargement of the shot above, converted to Black and White. Note: you need to have millions of colors to see this properly, thousands will not look good (I've tried, but can't seem to get lower bit resolutions to work).

The background for this page is an embossed image of the comet and the stars inthe sky.