The above photo was one of the last I remember taking with my Minolta SR201 SLR film camera. It was taken in April of 1997 a short distance from our Roseburg home.
The comet was known as Hale-Bopp, the last names of the two men who discovered it on the same night from two distant locations. Hale from his driveway and Bopp while looking through a friends telescope.
There is a comet coming this November that is being touted as potentially the “brightest in a generation.” Sounds like hype to me. Hale-Bopp was probably a once in a lifetime kind of comet. Only Sirus, the brightest star in the sky, was brighter. Considering how rare naked-eye comets are Hale-Bopp was off the charts, visible to the naked eye for 18 months.
I still kind of miss the old days of film cameras. In fact I even wrote about that once in a blog post titled Kodachrome and Sunny Days.
