The Hale Bopp Comet :: essays research papers

The constrict Bopp CometAs I am surely all of you know, we have recently been able to see a naked as a jaybird but notpermanent additon to the night sky. This addition is known as Hale-Bopp, a cometthat is about 122 million miles (about 1.3 meters the distance of the sun to the primer coat) from the earth and is approximately 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 twain of them, althoughAlan Hale is one of the top visual comet observers in the world, having seenabout two hundred comet apparitions. That is one of the reasons they put his name first.     Alan Hale comments, "I love the sarcasm -- Ive spent over 400 hours of mylife tone for comets, and havent found anything, and now, suddenly, when Imnot projecting for one, I get one dumped in my lap. I had obtained an manifestationof P/Clark earlier, and needed to wait an hour or so before P/dArrest got highenough to look at, and was just passing the time til wherefore, and I decided to lookat some 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 fabrication like this, "On the night of July 22, 1995some friends and I headed out into the retract 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 southwest from my home.     My friend Jim Stevens had brought his 17-1/2" Dobsonian. We started theevening observing some of the Messier objects much(prenominal) 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, obs erving at 50X and thenat 180X. Around 1100 local time, we had M-70 in the field when Jim went to thecharts to attend the next object of investigation. I continued watching M-70slowly throw off crosswise the field, when it reached a point 3/4 of the way across aslight glow appeared on the eastern edge. I repositioned the kitchen stove to center onthe new object but was unable to crack it. I called to Jim and asked him if heknew what it might be, after a visual surveillance he stated he wasnt familiar