Wednesday campfire chat this way.............. here

I also found this pic on the site. Take this and turn it horizontal and yup, thats what we saw.

After seeing the Hale Bopp comet, we do a lot of this now....LOL.

Chuck C this is exactly what we saw. I swear it was scary. As magnificant as it was to watch for days, it was also scary as it was just so big and bright..

Lots and LOTS of sky glow here which makes astro viewing dificult.  From here you can only see MAYBE 100 stars on a good night.  If your in a good place I think the number of +3 magnitude or greater stars you can see is between 2500 and 4000.

On July 23, 1995, an unusually bright comet outside of Jupiter's orbit (7.15 AU!) was discovered independently by Alan Hale, New Mexico and Thomas Bopp, Arizona. The new comet, designated C/1995 O1, is the farthest comet ever discovered by amateurs and appeared 1000 times brighter than Comet Halley did at the same distance. Normally, comets are inert when they are beyond the orbit of Jupiter, so it has been speculated that Comet Hale-Bopp is either a rather large comet or experienced a bright outburst (or both). The comet is the brightest comet since Comet West in 1976. From Hubble Space Telescope images, the comet's diameter has been determined to be about 40 km. The Pic du Midi Observatory has ascertained from their observations that the comet's rotation rate is 11.4 hours.

With over 5,100 images, this site has the largest collection of Comet Hale-Bopp images in the world available on the Internet. The home page is maintained solely on the volunteer efforts of myself.

On March 28, 1997, this home page become the first NASA website to get over 1 million hits in a day, when 1.2 million hits were recorded. This has since been topped by the Mars Pathfinder home page when the spacecraft landed on Mars on July 1997.

Ron Baalke

I will never forget seeing the Hale Bop comet as long as I live. That thing was absolutely massive. The tail was so long it was hard to believe you were actually seeing something like that. In actuality it wasn't close at all, and apparently no threat to earth. But if you had seen it, you would have doubted that claim.

It was traveling from East to West, and went on forever. I took a gamble to see if it would show up on my video camera and was even more shocked to find out, It did. so I can still watch it to this day.

We were living just north of Seattle at the time. Not a street light around us, so we got to see it very clearly.

I read about and tracked Hale-Bop's progress but never got to see it. The last one to get my attention was Hyukataki (SP?) I got some really cool pictures of that one and it's twin tails. Geez...that must have been 15 or so years ago...

But this one, 17P/Holems is quite the sight.  Wish I had all my camera gear up and working... 

Wow what a cool site. This sure brought back memories of the Hale Bob comet. I think that's what it was called. Watching that one go across the sky's scared the heck out of me. It was HUGE and for me, way to close. Sure made me think about what would happen if something like that ever hit us.

I managed to get some good video of that screaming across the sky. The tail was massive. Did you get to see that one?

 Suppertime, Bye everyone,

We have been seeing it in the morning and in the evening...