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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: October 23-27, 1995

A big new jet in Comet Hale-Bopp (1995 O1)

The images presented here show the evolution of a large eruption on Comet Hale-Bopp.i Each image 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.

In the penultimate frame (first image ), taken on the 23rd, in very poor conditions (the exposures were hand-guided because the cloud was too variable to allow autoguiding), the collimated jet appears quite bright still, although obviously much less so than on the previous night. The eastwards extension is now very faint again its position angle appears to have reduced somewhat again.

The second image taken on the 25th, shows that the base of the jet is now quite faint, but a clump of previously ejected material, now several arcseconds away from the nucleus, seems to be separating and twisting to the east; this is a particularly interesting image.

No observation was possible on the 26th due to high humidity at the start of the night, but it is evident that the jet is still active and likely to be visible for several more nights. The weather looks promising, at least for allowing us to follow this jet for a few more nights until it is extinguished.

The changes in the morphology suggest that there may have been several venting episodes over the space of a week. Comparison with the high resolution HST images taken on the 23rd will be very interesting and may reveal more about the emission mechanisms. In particular, some models explain the three jets which have been seen since August in terms of three distinct orifices on the nucleus, whilst other models are able to explain all of them with just a single orifice. We believe the former hypothesis, which is supported by mathematical modeling of the rotation and ejection phenomena. This point is critical to the future evolution of the comet and to our guess as to how bright it is going to get.

Images taken by: Ricard Casas, Luis Chinarro, Angel Gomez, Luis Manade, Santiago Lopez 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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