Comet Hale-Bopp Images - October 1995

133K 61K
Observer: Dave Buckley
Location: South Africa Astronomical Observatory
Date: October 1, 1995 UT

Images taken with the 1.0-m telescope at SAAO Sutherland. North is at the top and East to the left.

81K 26K
Observer: Dave Buckley
Location: South Africa Astronomical Observatory
Date: October 2, 1995 UT

Images taken with the 1.0-m telescope at SAAO Sutherland. North is at the top and East to the left.

31K 8K
Observers: Ricard Casas, Luis Chinarro, Angel Gomez, Luis Manade, Santiago Lopez and Miquel Serra-Ricart
Location: Teide Observatory, Canary Islands, Spain
Date: October 2-6, 1995

These images show the development of what appears to be a new jet in Comet Hale-Bopp (1995 O1). The comet has been observed virtually every night in September and October with the 82cm IAC-80 Telescope in Teide Observatory (Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain). Sequences of 300s exposures were taken in R for as long as the comet was visible each night (horizon limit approximately 20 degrees altitude).

91K

51K
Observers: H. Weaver, P. Feldman
Location: Hubble Space Telescope
Date: October 5, 1995

These images show a remarkable "pinwheel" pattern and a blob of free-flying debris near the nucleus. The bright clump of light along the spiral (above the nucleus, which is near the center of the frame) may be a piece of the comet's icy crust that was ejected into space by a combination of ice evaporation and the comet's rotation, and which then disintegrated into a bright cloud of particles.

Although the "blob" is about 3.5 times fainter than the brightest portion at the nucleus, the lump appears brighter because it covers a larger area. The debris follows a spiral pattern outward because the solid nucleus is rotating like a lawn sprinkler, completing a single rotation about once per week.

175K 147K
Observer: Dave Harvey
Location: Steward Observatory, Tuscon, Arizona
Date: October 14, 1995

The Steward Observatory 90" f/9 RC Reflector was used to take this 60 second unfiltered and unprocessed CCD frame on a loral 2k x 2k chip binned 3x3. The exposure was started at 01:58:23 UT on October 14, 1995. The field of view is 5 x 5 arcminutes. False color was used to better bring out the coma and its shape.

13K 9K
Observers: Ricard Casas, Luis Chinarro, Angel Gomez, Luis Manade, Santiago Lopez and Miquel Serra-Ricart
Location: Teide Observatory, Canary Islands, Spain
Date: October 11-18, 1995

29K 8K

29K 3K
Observers: Ricard Casas, Luis Chinarro, Angel Gomez, Luis Manade, Santiago Lopez and Miquel Serra-Ricart
Location: Teide Observatory, Canary Islands, Spain
Date: October 21-22, 1995

137K 43K

118K 37K

80K 45K
Observers: Karen Gloria, Eddie Bergeron, Kurt Anderson
Location: Apache Point Observatory, New Mexico
Date: October 16-17, 1995

These images of Comet Hale-Bopp were obtained at New Mexico's Apache Point Observatory, using the 3.5 meter telescope of the Astrophysical Research Consortium, on the evenings of 16 and 17 October, 1995. The infrared J-Band image (3rd image), shows the comet at wavelengths somewhat longer than can be seen by human eye. Comet and stars appear reddish in this picture. The other is a composite picture, made by combining green and red wavelength images. Here the comet appears somewhat bluer than most of the background stars. In both instances the comet appears as a fuzzy patch of gas superimposed on the stellar background of the Milky Way. The elongated structure is due to a jet of gases ejected from the comets nucleus; other observations of this structure suggest that the comet is spinning about its axis roughly once every five days or so.

96K 99K
Observer: Hal Weaver
Location: Hubble Space Telescope
Date: October 23, 1995 06:30 UT

Images of comet Hale-Bopp taken with the PC1 CCD chip of the Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). The upper left frame is a 60 sec exposure, the upper right is 300 sec long, and the lower frames are both 600 secs long. Each frame is 36.4 arcsec on a side, corresponding to 177,000 km at the comet. In all frames celestial North is at 130.7 deg CW from the straight up direction and East is at 90 deg CCW from North.

39K 14K
Observers: Salvador Sanchez, Antonio Garcia
Location: Observatorio Astronomico de Mallorca, Costitx, Spain
Date: October 23-24, 1995

31K 8K

29K 7K

33K 8K
Observers: Ricard Casas, Luis Chinarro, Angel Gomez, Luis Manade, Santiago Lopez and Miquel Serra-Ricart
Location: Teide Observatory, Canary Islands, Spain
Date: October 23-27, 1995

The images presented here show the evolution of a large eruption on Comet Hale-Bopp, the third to be picked up during the 46 nights of monitoring (to October 23rd) carried out at Teide Observatory. Each frame of the animation is the sum of from 4-9 exposures in broad-band R, each of 300s duration. Some of the exposures were taken at very high airmass through thick cirrus, hence the rather variable quality. The comet is visible for approximately 40 minutes at the start of each night at present and this time is reducing night by night. The images from each night are flat fielded and corrected for the overscan. They are then examined and poorly guided or unusable images are rejected. The remainder were recentered and processed with a gaussian and then Laplacian filter to bring out the fine structure around the nucleus.

67K 19K
Observer: Antonio Jose Cidadao
Location: Oeiras, Portugal
Dates: October 29, 1995

Images taken with a Schmidt-Cassegrin, Meade LX200, 10", f/10, equatorially mounted.

If you would like to submit a new image to this home page, contact:
Ron Baalke
ron@jpl.nasa.gov