Hyakutake was a small comet that passed less than ten million miles from Earth. At its peak, on the evening of 24 March 1996, it was a huge luminous blue ball floating below the Big Dipper, attached to which was a tail stretching a third of the way across the sky. I set up my tripod in the lee of my house night, which was brilliant, clear, and cold (14 degrees), and spent the next 90 minutes making photographs and just enjoying the spectacle. All of the images on this and the next page derive from a single 30-second exposure through a 105mm f/2/5 lens on Kodak's ISO 400 professional color print film. We begin with the straight color image. The three prominent stars above the tail are in the handle of the Big Dipper.

Sometimes, examining a negative image reveals detail more easily. That works with grayscale, but as can be seen below, the results with color have limitations.

Next, I tried posterizing the image.

That seemed to help, so I returned to the film negative, scanned the central part of the image at my scanner's highest optical resolution (1828 dpi), and posterized the image in Photoshop. The result shows three distinct levels of brightness around the comet's head.

Astrophotos often reveal interesting details when the red, green, and blue channels are broken out and examined as grayscale images. As expected, the blue channel revealed the most detail.

I chose to enhance the image formed by the blue channel. The results are on the next page.