The Hale Bopp Comet :: essays research papers

The Hale Bopp CometAs I am sure all of you know, we have recently been able to see a freshly but notpermanent additon to the night sky. This addition is known as Hale-Bopp, a cometthat is about 122 million miles (about 1.3 times the distance of the sun to theearth) from the earth and is almost 25 miles wide. Hale-Bopp wasdiscovered on July 23,1995 by two scientists named Alan Hale in New Mexico andThomas Bopp in Arizona. This is the first discovery for both of them, althoughAlan Hale is wiz of the top visual comet observers in the world, having seenabout 200 comet apparitions. That is one of the reasons they put his name first.     Alan Hale comments, "I love the irony -- Ive spent over four hundred moments of mylife looking for comets, and havent found anything, and now, suddenly, when Imnot looking for one, I get one dumped in my lap. I had obtained an observationof P/Clark earlier, and needed to wait an hour or so before P/dArrest got highenough to loo k at, and was just passing the time til then, and I decided to lookat virtually deep-sky objects in Sagittarius. When I turned to M70, I saw a fuzzyobject in the same field, and almost immediately suspected a comet, since I hadbeen looking at M70 last month, and *knew* there wasnt any other objectsthere."     Thomas Bopp explains his story like this, "On the night of July 22, 1995 both(prenominal) friends and I headed out into the give up for a dark of the moon observingsession. The site, which is west of Stanfield, AZ and a few mile south ofInterstate 8 is about 90 miles southwestern from my home.     My friend Jim Stevens had brought his 17-1/2" Dobsonian. We started theevening observing some of the Messier objects such as the Veil and NorthAmerican Nebulae in Cygnus, when Jim said " Lets look at some of the globularsin Sagittarius." We started our tour with M22 and M28, observing at 50X and thenat 180X. Around 1100 lo cal time, we had M-70 in the field when Jim went to thecharts to determine the next object of investigation. I continued watching M-70slowly drift across the field, when it reached a point 3/4 of the way across aslight glow appeared on the eastern edge. I repositioned the scope to center onthe new object but was unable to resolve it. I called to Jim and asked him if heknew what it might be, after a visual inspection he stated he wasnt familiar