Comet Hale-Bopp
and its
"mysterious unidentified companions"

There has been a lot of traffic and questions on the Net about an object following Comet Hale-Bopp. To answer them shortly, there is no evidence that the comet might be accompanied by any other object, natural or artificial.

Here is a short summary of the major events related to Hale-Bopp alleged companion:

• November 14, 1996: Chuck Shramek takes a CCD image of the comet. One of the background stars displays some spikes, giving it a "Saturn-like" look. On Art Bell's radio show, Mr.Shramek announced this Saturn-Like Object (SLO) to the world. The rumor spread on the net that this object was a huge spacecraft (3 times as large as the Earth). The original image is compared to the Palomar Sky Survey, and the SLO is identified as star SAO 141894.

• November-December 1996: Other SLOs were "discovered" in images released on different web sites. In all cases, the SLO was identified as a star and/or some CCD artifacts. A table lists all the "SLO" and companions I heard of, with the explanation of the phenomena which caused it. In order to help those who are not experience working with CCD images, the two pages linked below constitute a short summary of CCD imaging analysis techniques:
  • Basic image processing: the steps that an image undergoes between the telescope and a WWW browser.
  • Common CCD artifacts: how to determine if what you see on an image is from outer space or is inside the CCD.

• January 15, 1997: a new "UFO" picture was posted on Art Bell's and Whitley Strieber's web sites. We have identified that image as being a fake based on an image obtained by an astronomer at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy, Dr. David Tholen.

  A statement has been issued about this fraud (in HTML format with figures).

  Dr. Brown (who sent the hoax to Bell and Strieber) claims he received the original photo on film rolls. This is impossible since the original photo were obtained digitally. More details, including the real, raw images directly from the telescope, are available on this site.

• March 26, 1997: Thirty nine members of a cult were found dead in their Californian mansion. They apparently died in a carefully organized suicide. It seems that the victims believed they were going to meet Hale-Bopp's companion. I hope they found the peace they were searching, even if there was no UFO to meet them.

More details can be found on the The SLO Files of the www.halebopp.com site. Sky and Telescope has also published an article about this. Brian Monson has written a very intersting page describing how bright would be a large object at the distance of Hale-Bopp.

Olivier Hainaut