Clouds blanket the Flathead Valley from December through mid-March, interposing themselves between comet hunters and their quarry. After weeks of waiting, at 0400 on 24 February, I opened my front door and stepped into a hard, clear night. Hale-Bopp, tails just visible to the naked eye, hung brightly over the Swan mountains, their slivery peaks gleaming under a full moon.

Bundled in a goosedown mountaineering parka, I planted my seven-pound Bogen on my front porch, attached a Nikon, and, breath steaming in the 19-degree cold, exposed a roll of Konica 3200 color negative film that I had purchased for the event almost a year before. I used a 50mm f/1.8 normal lens, and a 200mm f/3.5 telephoto.

The brilliant moonlight concerned me --- after a few minutes, I actually could read by it ---but fortunately the negatives, although grainy, were not too dense to scan. After some experimenting in Adobe Photoshop, I compensated for the moonlight and brought Hale-Bopp into sharp relief. The second photograph was published in the Kalispell Daily InterLake, which ran a story on the comet.

Technical notes. I found Konica SR3200 fast but grainy. A couple of weeks later, on 8 March, I shot Fujicolor 1600, which was an improvement, but still grainier than I liked. After that I shot Fujicolor 800, a very fine film, and Kodak Ektachrome Elite 400 slide film pushed one stop. The slides looked very good on the screen.

All of these films are contrasty and tax low end film scanners. I use a Microtek Scanmaker 35t. With a dynamic range of 2.7, it can handle a density range of approximately 1-500. Unfortunately, the films I used have dynamic ranges of 3.0 and higher, so I ended up losing shadow detail in astrophotos that included terrestrial subjects.