Andy Steere's
COMET HYAKUTAKE
Photo Page
Last modified on 05/05/1996
Comet Hyakutake - pronounced "Hyah koo tah kay" according to Sky & Telescope magazine (HEAR IT! 55k WAV)- has captured the imagination of the most inexperienced sky watchers as well as the most advanced. It promises to be one of the best comets of the last 20 years. Comet West was just as bright (and may have had a brighter tail), but it's appearence in the early morning sky hampered it's wide appeal by the public. This comet (also known as 1996-B2) will be at it's brightest in the evening sky during late March and early April of 1996.
I plan on taking as many pictures of it as I can. The weather forcast for that period is extremely poor, so we'll have to see what chances I get. They will be arranged in the space below based upon the date of the photograph (latest first).
After a few trips to my photo-lab to see if I could get anything more out of the negatives... I have updated the pictures from March 26th. If you have seen those pictures before May 5th, then you should look again!
The bad weather we had for most of the comet's passage finally relented on Monday, March 26th. The reason being a strong artic cold front had pushed through the night before. While this brought crystal clear skies... it also brought plumetting tempratures and a strong north wind. Most of the day the winds howled out of the north at 20-30mph. Our club had a scheduled Public Comet Viewing session between 8:00pm and 10:00pm and while that went well, the view from on top of the University of Missouri at Columbia's Physics Building was hampered by the lights of the city.
After the public session was over, a few of us decided to venture out to the Central Missouri Astronomical Association's Wildhaven Observatory. This location, 10 miles to the northeast of the city of Columbia Missouri, offered us the best view of the northern sky that we could think of locally.
WOW! doesn't even begin to describe the difference between viewing the comet from inside the city and seeing it in all it's glory from a dark-sky site! The tail, which had only been visible to the trained observer as being more than a few degrees long, was VERY obvious and stretched all the way from the head in the little-dipper's scoop all the way back to the Coma Cluster. We estimated it to be 50 degrees long, nearly 4 degrees wide, but VERY faint. I made a comment on how the head of the comet looked like the head of an arrow and how the curved handle of the big-dipper looked like the curve of a bow, and how the Coma Cluster was the fletching on the back of the arrow... getting ready to shoot Polaris!
"BY FAR THE MOST AWESOME THING I'VE EVER SEEN IN THE NIGHT SKY!"
Once the Moon set a bit after midnight, and most of the club members had gone home, I started my work with the telescopes and cameras.
I took a number of pictures, even some with a Lumicon Deep Sky filter (which I figured would help with the skyglow)... but none of them showed the dust tail as we had seen it visually. Oh, the tail is there alright... but it is nearly lost in the skyglow of the non-filtered shots, and even less there in the filtered shots. Shouldn't have bothered with the DS filter, it seems to have cut out the more yellow light coming from the dust tail. All of the shots showed the much bluer ion trail pretty well.
This is a 10 minute exposure with a Nikor 50mm f/2 lens, running at about f/2.4 (stopped down a half-stop), and piggybacked on a 10" Meade SCT. The film used was regular un-hypered Fuji 400 Super G Plus.
This picture was originally written off as defective, due to the blue "defect" on the right hand side. Looked like a big smudge or something. After looking at a couple of other shots by other photographers... this is NOT a defect at all.. but rather an actual part of the comets tail! I have seen only a few pictures of this "defect", and no explanations for it.
The image is available in a low-res version (640x440x24bit JPG 114k) and a high-res version (1024x701x24bit JPG 152k).
This is a 10 minute exposure with a 135mm f/2.8 lens, running at about f/3.3 (stopped down a half-stop), and piggybacked on a 10" Meade SCT. I used the SCT to guide on the comet, which causes the stars to trail slightly. The film used was regular un-hypered Fuji 400 Super G Plus.
This shot shows the split in the ion tail very well. While some variations in this part of the tail were seen visually, this photograph brings it out and makes it obviously split.
The image is available in a low-res version (640x448x24bit JPG 100k) and a high-res version (1024x718x24bit JPG 182k).
This is a 20 minute exposure with a 4" f/5 Televue Genesis, filtered with a 48mm Lumicon Deep Sky Filter, and piggybacked on a 10" Meade SCT. I used the SCT to guide on the comet, which causes the stars to trail. The film used was regular un-hypered Fuji 400 Super G Plus.
The brilliant blue/green of the leading edge of the comet is very obvious in this photo (though more blue because of the deep-sky filter), as is the red and purple of the dust tail that was reported by some observers. This image has been gamma-corrected upwards to bring out the fainter detail of the dust tail.
The image is available in a low-res version (640x442x24bit JPG 60k) and a high-res version (1024x710x24bit JPG 175k).
I decided to try to pull more information out of the shot with the Genesis, since it had the highest magnification. If I had known that so much detail would be visible in the head of the comet, I would have tried to shoot it with the 10". Unfortunately, the comets position very near the north celestial pole, made that nearly impossible. A equatorial fork-mounted SCT has major problems with things near the pole.
This image shows the field of view of the next series of images. If you REALLY want it, here is a bigger version (640x429x24bit JPG 34k).
This image is from the same print as the one above, but this one has been processed, using Adobe Photoshop, to show the structure of the comet's coma.
This general shape of the coma closely matches the shape reported by observers, even though the inner core is grossly overexposed in this shot.
The image is available in a low-res version (640x490x24bit JPG 70k) and a high-res version (1024x788x24bit JPG 170k).
This image is a new print from the same negative. After a careful examination of the negative revealed a dot in the center of the comet, I had my photolab expose the print deeper so only that dot was white. This image is the result. No computer enhancement was used on this one.
The image is available in a low-res version (640x490x24bit JPG 92k) and a high-res version (1024x788x24bit JPG 132k).
This one is the new print, but processed in Photoshop to enhance the very core of the comet (and the very bright, but small jet coming from the back of it).
The image is available in a low-res version (640x490x24bit JPG 48k) and a high-res version (1024x788x24bit JPG 162k).
The thumbnail image (assuming your browser can view it) above was taken during the early morning hours of Saturday, March 16, 1996; from the Central Missouri Astronomical Association's Wildhaven Observatory. This location, 10 miles to the northeast of the city of Columbia Missouri, offered me the best view of the eastern sky that I could find.
This is a 15 minute exposure through a 4" f/5 Televue Genesis Refractor, piggybacked on a 10" Meade SCT (model 2120/50HSD). I used the SCT to guide on the comet, which causes the stars to trail slightly. As this comet nears the earth, the tail will increase (still pretty short in this shot) and it will appear to move even faster.
The film used was hypered Fuji Super G Plus, which seems to have resulted in a comet that was shifted too green. I used photoshop to bring the color-balance back closer to the comet's reported spectrum. I will try other films on this comet, if I get another chance (weather looks terrible for the next week or so).
The image is available in a low-res version (640x460x24bit JPG 50k) and a high-res version (1024x726x24bit JPG 108k).
A black and white version of this image appeared on the front page of the Columbia Daily Tribune (a local paper) on Wednesday, March 20, 1996.
I have produced a starchart (1024x768x16color 30K GIF) of this area, showing the photograph's frame. This chart was produced with the exceptional program MegaStar and shows stars down to 14th magnitude.
| ASTROP | HOME | STAFF |
Last modified on 03/28/2001
