#HALE BOPP COMET SKIN#

The dirty snowball turned out to be a 12Вkilometre-long peanut withДЄn unexpected jet-black skin pockmarked with vents from which evaporating material poured into space. So it was that Instamatic cameras were loaded with colour film in the expectation of frame-filling superВsaturated colour images and great was the disappointВment when they did not materialise.Д¬omet Halley actually performed very much as the astronomers had predicted, and their efforts to probe the coma were amply rewarded by photographs of the nucleus, as well as other data sent back by the probe Giotto. To many an entrepreВneur all this added up to the marketing opportunity of a lifetime, and it was exploited to the full with all the hype and misinformation that typifies such exercises. In 1986, interest was swelled by publicity from the astronomical community, for this was to be the first timeВ that space probes would investigate the coma (the veil of gas and dust which is the visible part of a comet) and nucleus, revealing that which is forever invisible from Earth. In 1910, the cometвЂ™s last appearance, it was singularly favourably placed and relatively close to the earth, so that its brilliant tail extended right across the night sky. Several of its previous appearances had been sufficiently bright to attract attention without the benefit of publicity, and been recorded in weaving or paint. In fact, the public had had unrealistically high expectaВtions of the 1986 return of this most famous of comets. Ten years ago, astronoВmers were monitoring the departure of Comet Halley from the inner solar system while the public grumbled that they had been had.

2022.06