Word: cometted
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...that's about to change dramatically. By the end of next week, Hale-Bopp's path across the sky will take the comet right into prime time. By April 1 or so, when it makes its closest approach to Earth, the comet will be high in the evening skies over the northern hemisphere, brighter than ever and showing a short but prominent tail. And there it will sit, not for a measly week like Hyakutake, but for more than a month. "I predict that this could be the most viewed comet in all of human history," says Daniel Green...
...this may come as news to most of us, but astronomers, amateur and professional alike, have been buzzing about Hale-Bopp ever since its discovery nearly two years ago. At that point the comet was more than half a billion miles from the sun, well beyond the orbit of Jupiter, and invisible without a telescope. But not necessarily a huge telescope: like most comets, this one was found by a pair of amateurs as familiar with their favorite regions of the sky as most people are with their own neighborhoods...
...July 23, 1995, Alan Hale, who has a Ph.D. in astronomy and makes his living running a research and educational company, was scanning the skies above his home in Cloudcroft, New Mexico. He was waiting for an already discovered comet to rise over his house when he trained his telescope on M70, a well-known cluster of stars in the constellation Sagittarius. "As soon as I looked," he says, "I saw a fuzzy object nearby. It was strange, because I'd looked at M70 a couple of weeks earlier and the object hadn't been there...
...this would turn out to be a known object. It didn't. "Now I felt I had a pretty live suspect," he says. He fired off an E-mail message to Daniel Green and Brian Marsden, who run the Bureau for the International Astronomical Union, reporting a possible new comet. A few hours later he looked again, and the object had moved. It was a comet for sure...
...precisely the same time. Bopp is a supervisor at a construction-materials company and, like Hale, a longtime amateur astronomer. He too saw the intruder and sent his own E-mail to the bureau. Thanks to their nearly simultaneous discoveries, Hale and Bopp share the honor of giving the comet their names...