Amateur astronomy helped find Hale-Bopp

I first started at the Bemidji (Minn.) Pioneer as an intern in the summer of 1996. That would begin six years as a news reporter, sports reporter and copy editor for a small, six-day-per-week daily newspaper in northern Minnesota. I wrote a large range of stories from multiple beats, to features to sports, my favorite being the coverage of the Red Lake Reservation High School basketball team named the Warriors. Here is a collection of my stories from my time at the Pioneer.

The name of Comet Hale-Bopp is a byproduct of the burgeoning hobby of amateur astronomy, professional astronomers say, and the comet may even give the movie "Return of the Jedi," which was recently re-released, a run for the number of viewers they attract this month.

Nationwide, on any given clear night, it is estimated that 400 astronomy clubs gather with telescopes to view the sky, according to a recent article in USA Weekend magazine. And the circulation of Sky & Telescope, a leading astronomy magazine, is up 25 percent to 100,000 subscribers in the past 10 years, the magazine adds.

One of these "amateur" astronomers shares the credit for discovering Comet Hale-Bopp.

On July 23, 1995, astronomer Alan Hale was in New Mexico looking at a star cluster in the constellation Sagittarius when he spotted a "fuzzy object," the magazine reports. At the same time, an amateur stargazer named Thomas Bopp saw the comet in Arizona. Bopp works for a construction materials company and belongs to an astronomy club.

The two names together, Hale-Bopp, make up the comet's name. Hale was given top billing because he reported it first, and he recorded the exact time he spotted the comet. Bopp did not.

Although the comet is known popularly as Hale-Bopp, the International Astronomical Union adopted a formal naming system for comets in 1995, resulting in Hale-Bopp being officially named Comet C/1995 01. The name indicates the month and year of discovery.

According to USA Weekend, Hale prefers the comets nickname, "especially the Hale part."

Comets are small, frozen masses of dust and gas that revolve around the sun in parabolic or elliptical orbits, according to Websters' New-World Dictionary: Third College Edition. They consist of three parts -- the coma, nucleus and tail. The coma is formed when the sun's heat vaporizes parts of the comet, forming a gaseous cloud surrounding the solid nucleus, and with the nucleous, forms the comet's head. The tail is usually comprised of ions.

Comets are believed to be among the most ancient residents of the solar system, probably even having formed along with the sun and planets 4.5 billion years ago. They may even contain the primordial material from which the solar system formed, and may have supplied some of the water that produced the oceans by bombarding earth as a young planet, according to information from the University of Minnesota Astronomy Department.

Comets come from two areas in the solar system. Some hail from the Kuiper Belt, a disk of icy rocks beyond the orbit of Neptune. Others come from the Oort Cloud, a much bigger area that may sprawl nine trillion miles from the sun -- halfway to Alpha Centauri, the sun's nearest neighboring star.

Hale-Bopp is believed to have originated from the Oort Cloud, along with many of the other comets that make appearances near earth.

Astrophysicists believe Hale-Bopp was pushed into its irregular orbit by the gravity of a star or cloud of gas and dust in which new stars are being born. This possibly happened 3,000 years ago and produced the more-than-3,000-year orbit it travels.

Comets that take less than 200 years to orbit are believed to have come from the Kuiper belt.

More information about Comet Hale-Bopp is available at the University of Minnesota's Astronomy Department's and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's homepages. The internet address is http://ast1.spa.umn.edu, and NASA's address is http://newproducts.jpl.nasa.gov/comet.