COMET OF THE DECADE, PART II

Until now, you had to be pretty much of an astronomy nut to see Comet Hale-Bopp. Not that the comet is especially hard to spot. For weeks it has been putting on a show to rival last year's Comet Hyakutake. People have seen Hale-Bopp, without a telescope or even binoculars, from such unpromising, light-polluted vantage points as midtown Manhattan and downtown Chicago. Amateur astronomers have been taking telescopic photos of the comet for well over a year; the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Hale-Bopp home page on the World Wide Web NewProducts.jpl.nasa.gov/comet has posted more than a thousand already, and more...