Last month marked the 25th anniversary of an unexpectedly spectacular comet: C/1996 B2, better known as Hyakutake (yah-koo-tah-kay). Nowadays comets tend to be spotted at great distances by robotic telescopes, but this one was discovered by an amateur comet hunter, Yuji Hyakutake, using binoculars (albeit huge ones, with 6" diameter lenses). The comet was barrelling towards us when it was found and made its closest approach to Earth just eight weeks later.
Back in 1996 I had no telescope or clock-driven mounting, but what I saw of the comet as I drove home from work one night was so impressive that I photographed it with what I had, a 35mm film camera on a fixed tripod. Hyakutake was by far the most impressive comet I have ever seen: it was bright, and it was HUGE, stretching an immense distance across the sky. Looking up at it in a dark sky, I could understand why people of old feared comets: we are used to things in the sky being tiny dots, or no bigger than the sun or moon, and when some celestial interloper stretches across a good fraction of the sky, you realize how puny we are compared to what's out there in the universe.
Click the picture above for a larger image and a wider-angle view. Here's the writeup I produced to go with prints of the picture that I wound up making for friends:
I got
home late on Tuesday night, around 2 AM. I'd seen the comet earlier in
the evening and on the long drive home, and I knew this might be my only chance to
shoot it with clear dark skies. So I grabbed my Nikon and a map, and set out to
get away from the lights of Springfield. I headed north on Rt. 32 and kept
driving, hoping to find a place without street lights. After passing Hardwick
(east of Quabbin Reservoir), I took a left turn onto a side road, which led to a
rustic old covered bridge, then headed uphill and into darkness. I stopped
beside an open field, set the camera on the tripod and started taking pictures.
In the dark sky the comet was spectacular—huge and ominous, hanging low in
the northern sky. The tail, almost invisible in the city, was very prominent,
extending about 30 degrees (twice the length shown in this photo.)
After half an hour of shooting, I came to the end of the roll and climbed into
the car to change the film with stiff, frozen fingers. When I stepped back
outside, the sky was completely overcast! Snow flurries dusted the windshield as
I drove home.
The photo is a four-minute exposure with a Soligor 135mm lens at f/2.8 on
Kodak Royal Gold 400 film, with the camera mounted on a fixed tripod. It was taken at
about 3:10 AM the morning of March 27, 1996. The star trails on the left are
caused by the rotation of the Earth during the exposure. The bright round star
on the right is Polaris, the North Star, around which all the other stars appear to
rotate. This photo was possible with such simple equipment because the comet
was so close to Polaris. A few nights earlier or later, and the comet would have been
distractingly trailed like the stars on the left.
A really nice collection of Hyakutake photos (and tales of the making of them) can be seen on fellow ex-New Orleanean Jerry Lodriguss's web site.
Tech notes: I scanned the 25-year old color negatives with an Epson V500 photo scanner and processed them using Affinity Photo and FastStone Image Viewer, with AstroFlat Pro doing a great job eliminating the pronounced vignetting of the wide-open camera lenses.
