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Re: (meteorobs) Hale/Bopp Obser 2/15/97
At 08:50 AM 2/21/97 -0500, you wrote:
>
>With another clear morning from La Mesa, Calif...but with an LM around 4.6,
>Hale/Bopp still looked like that bridalveil. It is definitely getting
>brighter...I give it a magnitude of +1.1 compared to Deneb at +1.3. The tail
>thru my 14X100's appear as 2.8 degrees long...no doubt hindered by the low
>LM. I heard a report from Venezuela that the comet may have split...I did
>not see anything to indicate this...but with a 14X100 I probably won't be one
>of the first to confirm such a thing. But the bright jet to the south is
>still there and it is still the only jet I can make out...both visually and
>photographically. My coma photographs with the 4" from Feb 19 does not show
>any hint either. I made a 1, 5 and 10 second exposures, but they still show
>only the southern jet and no hints of splitting. Maybe bigger scopes can see
>something?
>George Zay
>
Hi George
My friend and I seem to have had better luck photographing Hale Bopp when we
were at Mojave last Saturday morning. LM was around 5.5 and the seeing was
still a little hazy when Hale Bopp had risen high enough to be almost out of
the light pollution of a small town to the east. He used a 4"
Astrophysics refractor with a clock drive and bracketed his exposures to try
and get detail in the coma and tail. Last night he brought the photos round
and they they show the two tails very well. The long, thin ion tail to the
north shows up a very distinctly blue color. I'm not clever enough to gage
its length from the background stars but it measures about twelve times the
diameter of the coma, and a little less in width, before it diappears.
The dust tail is a light buff color and is about six times the coma
diameter, in length and width. The outside edges of the two jets form an
angle of about seventy five degrees, but there is a clear "v" shaped area
between them. The photographs do not show any sign of a possible spit.
It will be interesting to watch for that.
Ron