Coma of Comet Hale-Bopp

March 25, 1997 at 00:10UT

This is Comet Hale-Bopp as it appeared in a 2 second exposure at 7:10pm local time on March 24^th. This image shows the very head of the comet. There are two jets of gases coming from the comet (at about the 9 o'clock and 3 o'clock positions). There are seven shells of dust that have spiraled off the comet. This image was taken with a Meade Pictor 416 attached to a Meade LX200 8" F/6.3 telescope. The image was corrected with a dark frame and a flat field. The image was unsharp masked and stretched with a logarithmic enhancement.