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  Synchronic Bands in Dust Tail of Comet Hale-Bopp

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    Synchronic Bands in Dust Tail of Comet Hale-Bopp

Dear Comet Hale-Bopp friends, We, observing team of National
Astronomical Observatory of Japan, detected development of synchronic
bands in dust tail of comet Hale-Bopp 1995O1.

During our sequential imaging monitor of Comet Hale-Bopp 1995O1 with
using a wide-field CCD camera, which consists of camera lens of Nikon ED
180mm (f/2.8) and of MUTOH CCD CV-16, several filaments in dust tail
were recognized at least on March 6. The most prominent filament was
located at 2 degrees apart from the nucleus, and extended over 24
arcmin. The P.A. of this straight, narrow filament is about 340 degree,
which is almost coincident with the P.A. of the Sun-Comet line. We can
recognize at least 5 similar filaments in the dust tail. The color of
these filamentary structure is clearly that of the dust, which is shown
in our RGB color composite picture taken on March 7.83 UT.

The characteristics of these filaments is similar to that of the
synchronic bands, which appeared in dust tail of several great comets
such as comet West 1976VI, Seki-Lines 1962III, Ikeya-Seki 1965VIII, and
Mrkos 1957V, although the synchronic bands in these comets were observed
when the heliocentric distance was smaller than 0.5 A.U. It is
remarkable that comet Hale-Bopp shows synchronic bands at larger
heliocentric distance such as 1 A.U. Moreover, the formation mechanism
of the synchronic bands are still unclear, and several models are
proposed such as fragmentation model (Sekanina & Farrel, Astron. J., 87,
1836, 1982), and finite lifetime fragment model (Nishioka & Watanabe,
Icarus, 87, 403, 1990).

It is important to monitor time variation of the dust tail by using
wide-field imaging system in order to study the formation mechanism of
the synchronic bands.

Our images are released at our web site,

http://www.nao.ac.jp/whatsnew/index-e.html

The observers are H. Fukushima(National Astronomical Observatory of
Japan), M. Takata(Univ. Electro-Communications) and D. Kinoshita(Tohoku
Univ.).

-------------------------------------------------
Junichi Watanabe
Public Information Office
National Astronomical Observatory of Japan    / STAR WEEK in Japan /
Osawa, Mitaka, 181 Tokyo Japan               /                    /
                                            /    1997            /
e-mail:watanabe@pub.mtk.nao.ac.jp         ★    Aug.1-7         /
FAX:  +81-422-34-3810
Phone:+81-422-34-3644
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