Comet Hale-Bopp

This image of comet Hale Bopp was taken on 15 February 1997. The comet was so bright by this date that we has to use a 1% narrow-band filter centered at 2.144 microns (about 4 times the wavelength of light visible to our eyes) simply to reduce the amount of light reaching the detector! At the time this image was taken, the comet showed an obvious tail several degrees length without optical aid. This image is considerably smaller; the scale bar in the lower left corner is two arcminutes in length, or 1/15th the apparent diameter of the full moon.

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The cameras used for astronomical research contain much more information than apparent at first glance. This image of the nucleus and inner coma of comet Hale-Bopp was derived from the same data as the first image. It is roughly a 10x enlargement of the previous image, with the stretch, or gray levels, set to show more detail close to the nucleus, and using a different color table. The dark spot in the image is an artifact of the camera - the comet's nucleus was so bright that the image saturated in the 0.8 seconds it took to reset the infrared array! The scale bar in this image is 10 arcseconds long.

Images obtained by D. Thompson and C. Leinert.