My name is Lyle Enright. I carried the mail on a rural route out of Baker City for thirty-one years, and I have been going outside at night to look up for a good deal longer than that. My grandson Bryce set up this page for me over his winter break so that my sister in Sacramento, and anybody else who cares to, can follow along with the comet from here. Under the city lights she can barely see it. Out here it hangs over the pasture like a lantern somebody left burning.

I'll put down what I see, when I see it, and what the sky was doing. I'm no scientist. I'm a man with a pair of 7x50 binoculars, a six-inch reflector I built in 1971, and an old 35mm camera.

My Comet Log

Date	Sky	What I saw
Thu. Jan. 9 5:30 a.m.	Clear, 8°	Low in the east before dawn. In the binoculars a fuzzy star with a stub of a tail. Couldn't feel my fingers after twenty minutes.
Sun. Feb. 16 5:15 a.m.	Clear	No binoculars needed now. The tail was about as long as my thumb held out at arm's length. Woke up Margie to see it. She was a good sport.
Sun. Mar. 9 5:00 a.m.	Clear, still	Two tails! A broad white one that curves off to one side, and a thin straight blue one. The blue one is gas, the white one is dust. More on that below.
Wed. Mar. 12 8:30 p.m.	Some haze	First look in the evening, low in the northwest. So for a while there you could catch it at both ends of the night.
Sat. Mar. 22 8:45 p.m.	Clear	Closest to the Earth today. Nine people out in the pasture, counting two of the Hurleys' boys. Margie made cocoa.
Sun. Mar. 23 evening	Clear	Eclipse of the moon. The full moon in the southeast went dark and turned the color of an old brick, and the comet in the northwest seemed to jump out of the sky with the moonlight gone. I kept turning around. I have seen a lot of skies. I don't expect to see that one again.
Tue. Apr. 1	Overcast	Closest to the sun today. Cloudy all night. Figures.
Sat. Apr. 5 9:00 p.m.	Clear	First roll of film, 24 exposures, camera riding on my homemade barn-door tracker.
Wed. Apr. 9	--	Roll 1 back from the drugstore. Fourteen black, six blurry, four that look like a comet if you squint. Lesson learned: tripod legs sink into mud that's thawing.
Sat. Apr. 12 9:15 p.m.	Clear, dark	Drove up the reservoir road where there's no yard light for miles. Shot all of Roll 2, some exposures ten minutes long. Film goes in Monday. Pictures up here next week.

About the Comet

Its proper name is C/1995 O1, but everybody calls it after the two fellows who found it on the same night, July 23, 1995, neither one knowing about the other: Alan Hale in his driveway in New Mexico, and Thomas Bopp out in the Arizona desert with some friends and a borrowed telescope. When they spotted it, the comet was still out past the orbit of Jupiter. A comet that shows up at all from that far off is a big one, and that's why the astronomers got excited early.

• Closest to the Earth: March 22, about 120 million miles away. Nothing to worry about.
• Closest to the Sun: April 1, about 85 million miles out.
• The solid part, the nucleus, is thought to be a good deal bigger than most comets have, maybe twenty or thirty miles across. That's why it's so bright.
• The two tails: the curved white one is dust, pushed out by sunlight and left behind along the comet's path. The straight blue one is gas, blown straight away from the sun by the solar wind. Both always point away from the sun, which is why they point up from the horizon in the evening.
• It was last through here roughly 4,200 years ago, by the figuring I've read, and it won't be back for a couple of thousand years. So look now.

A word on the "companion" business. Last fall a fellow on a late-night radio program said a photograph showed something following the comet. Astronomers looked, and it was an ordinary star that happened to be behind it. There is nothing following Hale-Bopp but a lot of people's attention, and I'd rather folks spent that attention going outside to look.

Last spring we had Comet Hyakutake, which was a fine sight for a few nights with a tail that went halfway across the sky. This one is brighter, and it has stayed with us for months. Two great comets in two years. I waited a long time for one.

Coming Soon

Roll 2 photographs, as soon as they come back and Bryce shows me how to put them on the scanner at the library.
How I built my barn-door tracker from two boards, a piano hinge and a quarter-twenty bolt. The hinge points at the North Star, you turn the bolt once a minute, and the magic number is 11-7/16 inches from the hinge to the bolt. More on that with drawings.
Hyakutake pictures from last March, if Margie can find where she put the negatives.