In 1996 – 1997 Hale-Bopp put on a spectacular show.
The night of March 23, 1997 there was a near total eclipse of the moon. The day started off cloudy but a cold front went through in the afternoon and the skies cleared off by dusk. My son and I drove north of town and set up my newly built barndoor camera mount on a sideroad. The night turned out to be one of those special ones with rock steady pinpoints for stars. To the north there was Hale-Bopp and to the south there was a lunar eclipse. I took a number of photos of the comet. When I picked up my pictures from the local lab I showed them to Kevin, the owner and a professional photographer. He in turn showed me the pictures he had taken of the eclipse. He got the idea that he could composite the two images into a single photo. This is one of the early attempts made by just overlaying the two negatives. He later did a composite in PhotoShop that he sold a number of copies of.
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