First infrared ESO image of comet Hale-Bopp

This false-colour image of the newly discovered comet Hale-Bopp was obtained by Chris Lidman and Patrice Bouchet on August 5, 1995, UT 03:30, with the MPI/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla observatory. It was registered with the infrared-sensitive instrument IRAC2 on a 256x256 pixel Nicmos3 detector and through a J-band filtre (wavelength centered at 1.5 micron) during an 8-minute exposure. The scale is 0.52 arcsec/pixel and the field of the image covers 2.2 x 2.2 arcminutes. The atmospheric seeing was 0.8 arcsecond. North is up and east is to the left.