The Great Comet of 1996
(Photo by W.B. Whiddon, Red Rock Canyon, California, March 24, 1996 06:44 UT)
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In 1996 and 1997, Earth was graced with two of the most spectacular comets ever seen: Comet Hyakutake, the Great Comet of 1996, and Comet Hale-Bopp, the Great Comet of 1997. Most people know about Comet Hale-Bopp. No comet has ever generated as much advanced publicity. Its awesome size and the fact that there was over a year of warning made it visible to nearly everyone who was interested at all. It was visible to the naked eye for some 500 days, about twice the previous record for the duration of comet visibility. I myself passed that record before the comet had ever reached its brightest. What still stood in the way of most other observers, however, was light pollution. It is nearly impossible to convey to those used to living in cities what little they can see of the heavens. The vast majority of the record number of people to see this comet did so from the perpetual twilight of town, or what they thought was a safe distance. They saw only part of the tail and the whole effect was diminished. I saw two tails of different color, spread across a hand-length of the Milky Way. I saw weird hoods and shells in the coma the likes of which living astronomers had only seen in books. And I saw shades of blue in the ion tail that I can still barely imagine - but I saw them.
Then there was Comet Hyakutake. Few people saw this incredible object. It was not as intrinsically bright, meaning that the comet itself was not as big as Hale-Bopp, but it was as bright as Halley's ever gets, and it flew right past the Earth. There was a month and a half of warning, and by the time word got out to most people, the comet had faded. But in the next century, there are going to be a few people that do double-takes when they realize that the Great Comet they saw back in 1996-'97 was not Hale-Bopp, but Hyakutake. In 1910 there was another, brighter Great Comet that many mistook for Halley, and the same thing happened then. Like then, those like me who saw Hyakutake under dark skies are the lucky ones. This comet suffered greatly from city lights, because it was so spread out across the sky. It was nearly invisible from large cities, but outside in the Night, it had a head so large I could not hide it with my thumb held at arm's length, and the gossamer tail crossed half the sky. It was a pale but obvious green. It rotated around the sky all night, slowly but visibly crossing the handle of the Big Dipper, which it dwarfed. In the center visible in the telescope was a fury of plumes and jets that baffled me and my friends so much that we never mentioned it to each other until days later. Hale-Bopp was beautiful, but this was stunning. It is too bad, sometimes, that we have electricity. I would say 60 miles of separation from cities was needed to see what I saw. But I saw the great Comet of 1996, and it will be the one I talk about most between the two.
By the way, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in the heavens was another comet, Comet West in 1976. Almost no one knew about it. The press didn't get into it because they still smarted from Comet Kahoutek in 1973-'74, which came out drastically below expectations. It also did its thing in the morning, when most people, if they are awake, are wishing they weren't. I saw it from the coast in Puerto Peņasco, Mexico. I can't even begin to describe, really, what it was like on that frigid, wind blown morning in the dark as the sound of gale and crashing waves rent the air, while up there, untouched and silent, was the Banner of God in many colors.
I have a collection of pictures of Comets Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp that I took myself. All but one of them were done without star tracking, so I was limited in what I could do. Most were taken either in the Texas Hill Country near Llano or in the Guadalupe Mountains in southern New Mexico.
My pages on the questions "What is a Comet?" and "What does a Comet Look Like?"
The UA SEDS Comet Information Pages have much general and some more detailed information on comets.
The Comet Observations Home Page at JPL has up-to-date information on all comets visible to amateurs (with telescopes 16" or less) including collections of observer reports, ephemerides, finder charts, etc. Go here to find out about the next "Instant Comet" before it is too late.
Sky and Telescope has this wonderful page on Comet Photography. Hopefully we will get another chance to use this information soon.
The Comet Hyakutake Home Page at JPL, maintained by Ron Baalke, has about 2000 archived electronic images, as well as links to other sites with information
The European Southern Observatory's Hyakutake Home Page has images and detailed text information.
Gary Kronk's Hyakutake Home Page
Comet Hyakutake at NOAO, includes the excellent WIYN central object data.
The JPL page for comet radar imaging has images that can only be created for nearby objects.
This is my old Hale-Bopp page from the time near perihelion.
The JPL Comet Hale-Bopp Homepage maintained by Ron Baalke has about 4700 archived images, as well as a continuously updated list of news bulletins on the Comet.
The European Southern Observatory Hale-Bopp Information Page was the source of the best text-based news available on the comet, and still has all of this information archived. This comet is still being observed and is still producing jets that produce the "pinwheel" appearance that is the hallmark of this comet.
Comets have always brought out the weird in people. This is probably because they are unusual. Even though we now understand that comets are tiny objects far away from us, they still affect some people in mysterious ways. "Heaven's Gate" was foreshadowed by millennia of similar behavior. Ovid's Metamorphoses capitalizes on the tradition of the Gods being able to transform things from one shape into another to back up the claim that Julius Caesar was turned into a comet. In the Hale-Bopp encounter, the truly great "comet flap" was the story of the Saturn Shaped UFO near Hale-Bopp. An amateur astronomer with a digital camera (apparently) took a picture when the comet was near a star. The star was overexposed and the CCD chip in the camera "bled," casting off extra charge along one axis near the star, so that the star in the image appeared to have "rings" like Saturn. More experienced astronomers were able to identify the star, the type of CCD, and the exposure parameters from the image, but to the general public, it was a UFO. Never mind the fact that if the UFO were really flying next to the comet, it would have to be so huge to account for the picture - remember, we're ignoring overexposure here - that it's gravity would have pulled the planets off course. Some people wanted it to be a UFO, it seems, so it was a UFO to them, and for some of the more marginal, this had tragic results. It was truly in the tradition of ancient apocalyptic hysteria and forecasting the deaths of kings.
Anyway, if aliens were going to have whized by the Earth next to a comet, they would have picked Hyakutake.
Please mail suggestions and corrections to me at (iareth@io.com)