15K
Observer: Hal Weaver
Location: Hubble Space Telescope, Earth Orbit
Date: August 27, 1997 - February 19, 1998

The above figure shows the post-perihelion images of Hale-Bopp obtained with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Each frame is only 1.25 x 1.25 arcsec in size (25 x 25 CCD pixels), which means that we are focussing here on the innermost regions of the coma. The horizontal bar in each case subtends a distance of 500 km at the comet.

All three images have been normalized to the same peak brightness and displayed using the same logarithmic intensity stretch. There has been no image processing to enhance, for example, any coma jets or shell structures that might be present. The images have not been rotated to a common orientation because that would involve resampling the images, which leads to degradation of the resolution. Instead, the compasses show the celestial orientation of each image.

20K
Observer: Ian Griffin
Location: Astronaut Memorial Planetarium & Observatory, Cocoa, Florida
Date: February 20, 1998 00:00 UT

1 45 second image of Hale Bopp has been flat fielded to create this image. The image was obtained using a 12 inch Maksutov with 1524mm focal length and no filter. Image is 30 by 20 arc minutes. This is a red light image.

176K
Observer: Ian Griffin
Location: Astronaut Memorial Planetarium & Observatory, Cocoa, Florida
Date: February 21, 1998 00:00 UT

1 45 second image of Hale Bopp has been flat fielded to create this image. The image was obtained using a 12 inch Maksutov with 1524mm focal length and no filter. Image is 30 by 20 arc minutes. This is a red light image.

26K
Observer: Gordon Garradd
Location: Loomberah, Australia
Date: February 21, 1998 10:35 UT

120 sec exposure. North is up in this 22' X 15' field, false-colour palette applied to show detail in tail and inner coma. The dust in the orbital plane of the comet is still faintly visible as the more upright narrower portion of the tail ( also extends off the S side of the field) with the main dust tail angled more to the left (ENE). Taken with a 25cm f/4.1 Newtonian and HI-SIS 22 CCD.