Allen Ginzburg's Home Page

 

One of my hobbies (in addition to flying) is Astronomy. Below are a couple of pictures I took of the recent bright comets. For more information on comets see the NASA comet home page.

My image of Comet 1996 C2/Hyakutake taken March 24, 1996.

This image was taken at Quail Hollow Ranch, just outside Scott's Valley on the night of March 23, 1996. It is a 5 minute exposure on Fuji 400 speed film taken with a 135mm f/3.5 lens. The camera and lens were piggy backed on a Meade LX-200 computer driven telescope, and the tracking was guided on the comet nucleus. When this picture was taken, the comet was bout 10 million miles from Earth. The entire picture takes in about 14 degrees of sky. Compare this with the size of the full moon that is about 1/2 degree across.

Here is another comet that appeared a year later.

Comet 1995 O1/Hale-Bopp taken April 3, 1997

This comet was nearly 100 million miles away when this photo was taken at it's closest point to earth. It was much brighter than Hyakutake and would have been visible in the daytime had it been as close.

Besides photographing comets, I went to Aruba in the southern Carribean to view the total solar eclipse on February 26, 1998. Click here to see some pictures of that eclipse.