Comet Hale-Bopp was discovered far beyond Jupiter
On this day · 23 July 1995
On July 23, 1995, two amateur astronomers independently spotted a faint smudge near a star cluster — Comet Hale-Bopp.
On July 23, 1995, two American amateur astronomers — Alan Hale in New Mexico and Thomas Bopp in Arizona — independently noticed an unfamiliar fuzzy patch near the globular star cluster M70 in Sagittarius. Each tracked its slow drift, suspected a comet, and reported it the same night. The object took both their names: Comet Hale-Bopp.
What startled astronomers was the distance. The comet was about 7.15 astronomical units from the Sun — out beyond Jupiter, roughly between Jupiter and Saturn — by far the farthest a comet had ever been picked up by amateurs. Something visible at that range had to be unusually large.
It was the most distant comet ever discovered by amateurs at the time.
The hunch paid off. By the spring of 1997, Hale-Bopp blazed into one of the brightest comets of the 20th century, hanging in the evening sky and visible to the naked eye for a record stretch of about 18 months.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
