Comet Hale Bopp

Here's a picture I took from the hill road above Penrhyncoch around the middle of March 1997. The exposure time was roughly 1 minute, the aperture 1.8, the lens 55mm and the film ASA 200.

I'm really happy with the result, especially the view of the ion trail (the blue tail), which was not easily visible to the naked eye that night.

[November 2007]: I've just found all my old photos of this comet, and have re-scanned the best. I now know more about stacking images to improve the quality. This next picture is the result of aligning seven photos taken on 11th April 1997(using hugin) and averaging the aligned scans together (using a simple program I wrote for the purpose). The exposure time is around 30 seconds on each picture and the other settings were as above.

I mentioned using "hugin" above. Having looked around for free image stacking tools, I wasn't hugely impressed by the options. I've been playing with "hugin" for panorama stitching recently and realised that this could be used for aligning the images too. All I did was load the images into hugin, define control points, optimise the alignment and tell it to stitch with blending enabled (using enblend). This results in hugin creating aligned TIFF files for enblend to use. I then ignored the blended output, converted the aligned TIFF files to PPM format and stacked them using the program available here.