Teide Observatory Images of Comet Hale-Bopp

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Observers: Ricard Casas, Luis Chinarro, Angel Gomez, Luis Manade, Santiago Lopez and Miquel Serra-Ricart
Location: Teide Observatory, Canary Islands, Spain
Date: September 26 - October 6, 1995

New Spiral Jet in Comet Hale-Bopp

These Hale-Bopp images show the development of what appears to be a new and extremely bright jet in Comet Hale-Bopp (1995 O1). The comet has been observed virtually every night in September 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). The latest images which show the development of the jet were taken on September 26th, 27th , 28th and October 2nd, 3th, 4th, 6th. They have been flat-fielded and overscan corrected and then aligned to give a constant position for the nucleus. The images were then processed using a standard unsharp mask and summed. All images are looked at individually, and any bad ones (eg: poor guiding) are excluded from the summed image. In the images North is up East is left. It is important to note that it seems the jet started to appear around the 24th. We have a report from some reliable amateurs in Mallorca from OAM (Observatorio Astronómico de Mallorca) that there was a surge in brightness about this time (they estimate 2 magnitudes in the nuclear condensation according to their wide field CCD images).

Images taken by: Ricard Casas, Luis Chinarro, Angel Gomez, Luis Manade and Miquel Serra-Ricart

Reduced by: Ruth Torres-Chico and Miquel Serra-Ricart

Animation by: Miquel Serra-Ricart

Analysis and text: Mark Kidger and Ruth Torres-Chico

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