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S&T's Weekly News Bulletin

August 1, 1995

Comet Hale-Bopp

On the morning of July 23rd, two amateurs discovered a new comet just south of the Sagittarius Teapot near the globular cluster M70. Alan Hale in Cloudcroft, NM, and Thomas Bopp near Stanfield, AZ, were both using 16-inch reflectors. They described the comet as a tailless, 11th-magnitude glow. Thanks to hundreds of positional observations, Brian Marsden of the IAU's Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams has calculated that Comet Hale-Bopp is a whopping 7 astronomical units from the Sun -- well beyond Jupiter, and farther away than any comet discovered by amateurs before. The fact that it can be seen at all suggests it may be experiencing an outburst, which might be making it appear 5 to 10 magnitudes brighter than it otherwise would be.

Meanwhile, Warren Offutt, a New Mexico neighbor of Hale, used his 24-inch reflector and a CCD to record a "spiral coma," an appearance typical of Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 after its own outburst. Moreover, Offutt says the new comet has shrunk and dimmed a little in the past week. Sky & Telescope columnist John Bortle notes that when a comet undergoes an outburst, a second flare-up sometimes occurs about 30 days later. Bortle was intrigued by Hale-Bopp's fan-shaped head when he observed it on July 31st.

According to Marsden the comet will reach perihelion in March or April of 1997, just inside the Earth's orbit. It will grace the predawn sky for northern observers that spring, but how bright it will get is still anybody's guess. For now it's magnitude 10 or 11 and crossing Sagittarius. Here are Hale-Bopp's coordinates (equinox 2000) for 0 hours Universal Time: 

           R.A.  (2000)  Decl.
           =====================
August  1  18h 38.0m    -31d 55'
August  6  18h 34.7m    -31d 46'
August 11  18h 31.7m    -31d 35'

Saturn's New Moons

When Earth passed through the ring plane of Saturn on May 22nd, observers Amanda Bosh and Andrew Rivkin used the Hubble Space Telescope to detect two, and perhaps four, new satellites of Saturn. These objects are too close to Saturn and too faint to be seen near the bright ring system ordinarily. But the rings' edge-on geometry made their discovery possible. Two of the sightings could be of two known moons, Atlas and Prometheus, but the Hubble locations don't correspond to where their orbits predict they should be. The others, which are 17th and 18th magnitude, are clearly new objects. An image from HST's May 22nd run appears on page 11 of Sky & Telescope's July issue.

Meteors this week

The coming week features a pair of lesser meteor showers with radiants in the southern sky. The South Delta Aquarid shower comes to a slow maximum at 5h Universal time on July 29th (the night of July 28th), which is during the dark of the Moon this year. Peaking one day later is the Alpha Capricornid shower, which though generally weak has a high proportion of bright meteors.

Galileo burns! (again)

The Galileo spacecraft, having been freed of its atmospheric probe just two weeks ago, fired its engine for 306 seconds on July 27th. The result was a velocity change of 225 km per hour -- not much compared to its cruising speed but enough to ensure that the spacecraft will not plunge along with the probe into Jupiter's atmosphere next December 7th. On that date the main spacecraft will fire the engine again, this time much longer, to slip into orbit around the giant planet.
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