Probably the most spectacular comet of recent times was Comet Hale Bopp C/1995/O1. This was an amazing comet with two distinct tails, a straight ion tail and the curving dust tail.
These two shots were taken from La Palma, 24 hours apart and show the movement of the comet through the stars of Perseus.(Taken with my old 85mm lens, 20 secs exposure on TMAX3200 film.)
Above is a false colour coded image of Comet Hoenig C/2002/O4 taken with an 80mm refractor, exposure time of 120 seconds. The comet was around magnitude 8 and the moon was nearly full. It seems that this comet broke up and disappeared shortly after this image was taken.
Another comet which was observed over an extended period was Comet Linear C/2001/WM1. The comet was around mag 11 when I took this exposure. I didn't expect the TC211 camera to be sufficiently sensitive with a short exposure to record it. It has a faint fan shape tail extending to the right on the frame.
Comet Ikeya-Zhang . Done the old fashioned way using a 300mm f4 (right) on Ilford HP5+ film. Exposed for 2 minutes and developed in IDll (1+1) for 15 minutes.
A comet which should put on a good display in 2004 is C/2002/T7. This might make it to first magnitude in May next year. In this image the comet is around mag +10 and is about 30 arc secs across. The conditions were very poor. The naked eye limit was only about 3.5 and there was cloud coming and going as well as murky haze.
Some more recent comet shots. Unfortunately both of the comets didn't quite make it to their predicted brightness but both looked great in binoculars. These pictures were taken from Siding Spring Mountain, NSW, Australia.
On the left is Comet 2001/Q4(around mag +3.5 2102 AEST 9/5/04). Its a 12 min exposure on provia 400 taken with an ancient 85mm lens at f2.4. Above the comet at the top of the frame are M46 and M47 and to the right M48. There are many other clusters in this comet/galactic plane shot.
On the right is a shot of Comet 2002/T7 (around mag +3.0 1837 AEST 21/5/04). This shot was actually taken through quite heavy cirrus. The bright star lower right is Sirius. This is an 8min exposure taken with the same set up as the 2001q4 shot.
The Leonids produced one of the most spectacular displays of bright fireballs ever seen.
This was a spectacular fireball of at least magnitude -8 but it was seen through cloud so I don't know how bright it really was.
A nice -1 leonid streaking towards Ursa Minor and a meteor from the 1999 leonid shower (through high cirrus).
The 2004 Perseid display showed a nice peak in the early hours of the 12 August.
After many years and films I finally managed to catch a nice -2 in the centre of the frame
This page is quite old now but other more up to date images can be found on the NLC observers forum scattered about the general board.
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