"It's fading in and out," says Hale, peering through binoculars.
Moments later, the celestial body is unmistakable—a large, fuzzy splotch of light set off against an array of brightening stars. Officially designated Comet C/1995-01, it is known to the world as Hale-Bopp, after the two amateur astronomers who discovered it, independently, one night in July 1995—and who now take turns gazing at it through a small telescope.
"It looks good," says Bopp.
"A lovely looking comet," says Hale. Hale-Bopp. It sounds vaguely like one of the Waltons, but in fact it's an astronomical sensation—the mother of modern comets—more brilliant than any observed from this planet in 400 years. In late March and early April, as it travels closest to earth, approaching within 122 million miles, Hale-Bopp will appear as bright as the most vivid stars. Call it a triumphant comeback. According to astronomers' calculations, Hale-Bopp made its most recent visit 4,200 years ago. No ancient reports are known, but the last human eyes to observe it might have included, say, those of a pharaoh. "It's a glorious comet," says Carolyn Shoemaker, an astronomer who has found more comets—32—than anyone else alive. "I can't resist waking up at 4 in the morning to look at it."
Essentially, comets are clumps of frozen gases, remnants of the birth of the solar system—"dirty snowballs," astronomers call them. They blossom as they draw near the sun, spawning luminous tails millions of miles long. It can make for a dramatic spectacle—though some ballyhooed comets have been less brilliant than expected, notably Kohoutek, in 1973, and Halley's fabled comet 13 years later. Hale-Bopp, though, has not disappointed and has brought celebrity to the men for whom it is named.
Now linked for the ages, the pair were perfect strangers on the night of July 22-23, 1995. Hale, 39, was out in his "observatory" that evening—actually the driveway of his Cloudcroft, N.Mex., home, scanning a star cluster in the constellation Sagittarius. He noticed a cometlike blob but remained skeptical. "I thought, 'I'm going to point my telescope to a random part of the sky and find a comet. Yeah, right.' "
But an hour later he discovered that the object had moved, just as a comet would. And so he excitedly e-mailed the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams in Cambridge, Mass., which registers celestial events and credits their discoverers. Then, Hale recalls, he woke his wife, Eva, a neonatal care nurse: "I asked, 'Are you interested in looking at Comet Hale?' "
What Hale didn't know was that almost simultaneously, in the Arizona desert 90 miles southwest of Phoenix, Tom Bopp, 47, had seen the same mobile blob through a friend's telescope. Eager to stake his claim, he raced 20 miles to a truck stop and tried to notify the Central Bureau by telegram. But he didn't have the proper address, so he drove to his Glendale, Ariz., home, found the address and tried again. The next morning he got a call from the Central Bureau's Daniel Green. "He said, 'Congratulations. I think you've found a new comet,' " recalls Bopp, who did a happy dance in the kitchen while his wife, Charlotte, manager of a dry-cleaning shop, looked on in disbelief.
A day later, Bopp received another call, this one from Alan Hale. 'He said, 'I think we have something in common,' " reports Bopp. They met two months later, at a stargazing conference, and discovered they shared more than a comet. Both are burly and balding, and both are, for the moment, unemployed. Hale, who has a Ph.D in astronomy, is the unsalaried director of the nonprofit Southwest Institute for Space Research. Bopp, who never finished college, until recently managed the parts department of a building materials company but quit to exploit his newfound celebrity as a lecturer.
Remarkably, there seems to be no hint of jealousy between the two, though each, but for the vigilance of the other, might have enjoyed the fruits of unhyphenated fame.
"His discovery is as legitimate as mine," says Hale, whose message to the Central Bureau arrived just before Bopp's.
"I think it's neat he turned out to be a nice guy," says Bopp of Hale. "He could have been a jerk."
RICHARD JEROME
MICHAEL HAEDERLE in Cloudcroft
- Contributors:
- Michael Haederle.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
