August 25, 1995
August 25, 1995
Alan Fitzsimmons & Martin Cartwright (Queens University, Belfast):
"In August 1995 we monitored the spiral jet in the inner coma over a period of 6 days, observing that it did not change position during this time. The image above was obtained on the 25th August 1995 when the comet was 6.9 AU from the sun and 6.3 AU from the Earth using the 1m Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope on La Palma using the cassegrain CCD camera plus R-band filter. The image is centered on the nucleus and is 19 arcsec by 19 arcsec. The spiral jet of material appears to extend over 5 arcsec from the nucleus, or over 25,000 km at the distance of the comet."
September 26, 1995
Hubble Space Telescope Observer: Hal Weaver
"The image to the left is from a 300 second exposure and shows how the ``pinwheel'' structure of the cometary coma clearly distinguishes Hale-Bopp from the numerous stars in the field. The stars are streaked because the HST was tracking the motion of the comet. This image is 51 arcsec on each side. The magnified view to the right is a composite created from two images, one exposed for 60 sec and the other for 300 sec, and shows more detail in the inner coma. Each pixel in this image projects to a distance of ~470 km (= 290 miles) at Hale-Bopp, and the full frame is 70 pixels (=7 arcsec) on each side. There is a ``clump'' of material about 1.4 arcsec directly above the nucleus. It appears that this material is the remnant of a piece of the nucleus that was ejected about 60 hours before this image was taken and is moving through space with a projected speed of ~30 meters per sec (=110 km per hour, or 67 miles per hour)."
October 23, 1995
Hubble Space Telescope Observer: Hal Weaver
"Taken with the PC1 CCD chip of the Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). Celestial North is at 130.7 deg CW from the straight up direction and East is at 90 deg CCW from North. The image has not been "cleaned", which means that it is littered with background stars, cosmic ray events, and hot pixels. The nucleus is near the highly saturated region. This particular intensity stretch was chosen in order to bring out the faint feature that's about 3.5 arcsec due north the nucleus (i.e., at 131 deg CW from straight up). This feature is almost certainly the remnant of the outburst that took place on 10/13 and which was first reported during observations on 10/14 from the Teide Observatory in the Canary Islands. The average projected speed of this clump of material is about 20 meters/sec."
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1996 Unusual Observations Synthesis
1995 Unusual Observations Synthesis