This series of three photos of the unusual Comet Hale-Bopp demonstrates that the comet is much larger than thought so far. In fact, its nucleus is surrounded by a dust cloud that measures more than 2.5 million kilometres across. Note that because of the wide field they represent, each of the images is available in two sizes, the larger of which has considerably better resolution. The exposure lasted 30 min and was made on sensitized Kodak IIIa-F emulsion through a red RG630 filtre. Each of the three photos covers the same sky area of approx.
North is up and East is to the left.
The distances from the Earth and the Sun were 930 and 1040 million kilometres, respectively. The diffuse image of the comet is situated at the centre. The comet moved 8 arcsec towards West and 3 arcsec towards North during the exposure. In this process, the contrast has been greatly increased so that even very faint areas of the diffuse coma become visible. The comet now appears as a roughly circular, dark object in the front of myriads of stars in this sky area.