Looking at Comet Hyakutake

On March 22, we went outside of Houston about 30 miles to view Comet Hyakutake. We could see it with the naked eye and with our Galilean telescope. We took pictures with thirty second and one minute exposure times. Here is what we saw which is pretty true to what we saw with our naked eye.

Through the telescope, it was a large, fuzzy object.

We were not able to see a tail with or without the telescope. However, others in darker sites claim they were able to see a tail. Galileo, with his refined observational skills, certainly used his telescopes to view the three comets of 1618. In his Assayer of 1623, Galileo argued that comets were merely optical phenomena.

For more pictures and information about Comet Hyakutake, check out these other sites on the web.

• A variety of pictures of Comet Hyakutake
• Astronomy Picture of the Day
• Comet C/1996 B2 (Hyakutake) at NOAO
• Coordinates for Comet Hyakutake (Beware: This one takes a while to load!)
• Comet Hyakutake's Tail

Would you like to learn more about comets in history? Click here to go to the Galileo Project's summary of this topic.

Return to the astronomy group home page.