Hale-Bopp
Hale-Bopp on March 9th 18:07, March 31st 19:11 and April 17th
19:13 UT in Johnson V, 1 sec exposure taken on the OLT.
A highpass filter was applied to these images to reduce the strong
radial gradient in the light distribution.
From March to May 1997, Oliver
Czoske, Lubos Kohoutek and myself used
the 1.23m Oskar-Lühning
Telescope of the Hamburg
Observatory equipped with a small CCD camera to monitor comet
C/1995 O1 Hale-Bopp. In about 20 clear nights, we obtained a total of
600 images in Johnson BVRI bands. Despite the bad seeing most of the
time, the structures of evolving and rotating spiral arms and shells around the
nucleus,
caused by rotating jets, are clearly visible on our images.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to carry out a deep analysis of our
data. I started doing this by simulating the evolution of the dust shells
numerically but then went back to gravitational lenses which are the main
subject of my work.
Preliminary
results of this work and some effort of Hanns Selig are the direction of the
rotation axis and the rotation
period. Both values are not far away from values in the literature but
show interesting deviations.
If you are interested in analyzing the data more deeply, please send me a note.
It should be possible to determine the cometographic positions
of the active regions of Hale-Bopp, the ejection velocities and the influence
of the solar wind and radiation pressure on the evolution of the dust jets.
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To the AIfA
To the University of Bonn
This document last modified Wed Aug 15 14:53:35 CEST 2007