An "international" comet Hale-Bopp image

This photo is a false-colour reproduction of the central part of a CCD frame that was obtained by visiting astronomers Mats Dahlgren (Uppsala Astronomical Observatory, Sweden) and Felix Lahulla (Observatorio Astronomico Nacional, Madrid, Spain), observing with the Dutch 0.90-metre telescope at the ESO La Silla observatory in Chile. The pixel size is 0.44 arcsec and the field measures approx. 1.2 x 1.2 arcmin. North is up and East is to the left. It is a 2-min exposure, taken through a red filtre, just before midnight (UT) between August 31 and September 1, 1995. The astronomers cleaned and flat-fielded the image before it was transmitted to the ESO Headquarters in Garching (Germany) where it was colour-coded for display on the ESO WWW Hale-Bopp Homepage.