A Hale-Bopp
Astrophoto Diary
This started as a personal project to take some pictures
of comet Hale-Bopp during its visit to the inner solar
system. I knew that astrophotography was harder than it
looked, based on attempts I had made a few years earlier,
but my goals this time were modest: I would "piggyback" a
conventional camera on my telescope and make some time
exposures of the sky in the general direction of the comet.
The telescope's clock drive would track the sky's motion and
prevent the stars from making trails during the minute or so
that the shutter would be open.
This plan seemed simple enough. In executing it however,
I discovered that I had underestimated the perversity of
inanimate objects and natural phenomena.
I had three general photographic goals that evolved over
the three months that I worked on this. The first was
simple: find out what film types and exposure times worked
well to make comet pictures. The second was to take a
picture of the comet with a cityscape in the view; from all
predictions the comet was going to be bright enough to do
this. The final picture I had in mind was a nice comet
"portrait": a long tail and pinpoint background stars.
The pursuit of these goals was quite an adventure. I
ended up with a set of pictures that largely met my goals,
but I was consistently surprised that they were not the ones
I expected. Instead, the pictures that turned out best were
the practice shots, or the exposure tests, or the ones I
took only because I wanted to finish the roll of film!
Of course, the reason for this may be that I rarely was
able to make an exposure without something going wrong.
Every picture has some story behind it that usually includes
a disaster. At first I thought this was just my
inexperience, and that I don't function very well in the
early predawn hours, but after a while I had to conclude
that it was even more than this. This hobby intrinsically
has many things that can go wrong. My conclusion, and my
advice, is that to do this sport you mostly need
perseverence and the right stuff, including good
long-underwear.
So here are my pictures of Comet Hale-Bopp as it passed
through our neighborhood as seen from beneath the skies of
Minneapolis and its surrounding area. They are arranged in
chronologic order as the comet moved along its path across
the constellations in the map above.
June 1997
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