Comet Halley, by comparison, was 100 times (five full magnitudes) fainter at the same distance. That’s extremely bright for such a distant comet. It had a brightness of magnitude 10.5 when it was discovered by Hale and Bopp between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. The next morning, the comet was announced to the world.Īstronomers suspected right away that Hale-Bopp was a big one. He also confirmed it was an uncharted object and contacted Western Union to send the word to Harvard.
Bopp, an auto parts manager who didn’t own a telescope, was out with friends touring Sagittarius with a homemade 17.5″ Dobsonian when he watched the globular cluster M70 drift out of the field of view of the stationary telescope and watched the comet drift in. It came from the amateur stargazer Thomas Bopp in Arizona. On the same night, Marsden was surprised to receive not an email but an old-fashioned telegram. Satisfied he had found something interesting, he followed astronomical protocol and sent an email with the position and motion of the object to Brian Marsden at the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams at Harvard, the official center for tracking and announcing transient astronomical events such as comets. The constellation is chock-a-block with fuzzy deep-sky objects, so Hale took care to make sure the new object was indeed uncharted, and he watched it move against the background stars during the night. On the night of July 23, 1995, the astronomer Alan Hale was visually tracking fainter comets using a telescope in his driveway at his home in New Mexico when he noticed an unexpected smudge near the globular cluster M70 in the constellation Sagittarius. Like most newly-observed comets, Hale-Bopp was discovered by accident.
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