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March 7, 1997 - Art Bell

01:50:47

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Alan Hale - Comet Hale-Bopp

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alan hale

01:05:17

38:41

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art bell ▲ ● ▼		From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening.
		Is Coast Coast A.M. I'm Mark Belch.
		And it is going to be an interesting show.
		This morning, we're going to talk comets with Dr. Alan Hale, who is the co-discoverer of the Hellbop Comet.
		And we're going to try and drill into some brains out there that you've got to get your butt out the door and take a look at this thing because it's not something that you have to go search real hard for at the right time.
		You go out and it hits you right in the eye, as long as you've got a relatively cloudless sky.
		It is the comet of your lifetime, I believe.
		And it's being undercovered in the media.
		But moved with his family to Almogordo, New Mexico later that year, where he lived until his graduation from high school in 1976, then attending the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
		After graduating from there in 1980 with a bachelor's degree in physics, he was stationed at various assignments in San Diego and Long Beach.
		After getting out of the Navy in 1983, worked for two and a half years as an engineering contractor for the Deep Space Network at JPL in Pasadena, was involved, among other things, with the Voyager 2 encounter with the planet Uranus in 1986.
		Later that year, left JPL, returned to New Mexico in order to attend graduate school at New Mexico State University, earned his Ph.D. in astronomy from NMSU, New Mexico University in 1992, and during the following year founded and became director of the Southwest Institute for Space Research.
		Now based in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, the Institute is an independent research organization that strives to enhance the scientific literacy of the general public through the providing of opportunities for direct participation in research programs and through other educational activities.
		His professional interests include the study of stars like the Sun and the search for other solar systems, including those that may contain planets similar to Earth.
		He has authored several research papers in this field.
		He is also interested in the present efforts to identify potential Earth-impacting asteroids and comets and is currently engaged in initiating a search program for these objects to be conducted from southern New Mexico and which will include participation by school students and the general public.
		He, of course, is the co-discoverer of Comet Halebop.
		That was in July of 1995.
		And now from New Mexico and here to tell us which city will be impacted by Comet Halebop and which Pleiadium beam ship is lurking behind the comet carrying thousands of green people is Alan Hale.
		Alan, hi.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I hope you have a sense of humor.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yes, that's the people who know me.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Some may say I do, some may say I don't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
		All right.
		Well, before the night's over, I'm sure we'll find out.
		Let us begin, I guess, Alan, by airing the fact that we did have differences.
		We did.
		Way back when, when the Courtney Brown affair began, I was upset with you over the Chuck Schramick business, and I'm sure you were upset with me over the way I handled the news or the information I received from Chuck Schramick and from Professor Brown.
		And so all of that did occur.
		And if you have any comments on it, I think you referred to my program as the weekly world news of radio or something like that.
		And so we had all that happen between us.
		But it is my view that what's going on in our sky right now is a whole lot more important than any differences we had.
		And I think we're both willing to let those go.
		And you've got a hell of a comet out there, my friend.
		I get every single morning because of my hours, and I, you know, after the show, I go out and take a look, and this comet is nothing short of incredible.
		What is going on?
		Well, no, take me back.
		Take me back.
		I'm sure everybody wants to know to the day you discovered this comet.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What was it like?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Well, it was an ordinary old night, really, although it was a very gorgeous one.
		As in that bio sheet that I sent you, I follow known comets as a hobby.
		There's usually two or three or more visible with a decent telescope on any given clear night if you know what you're looking for.
		And there's overwhelming majority of those things are dinky, little fuzzy things that very few people pay attention to, except for those of us who actually do follow and study these things.
		And I had gone out that evening to look at the two comets I was following.
		If you're familiar with the weather in this part of the country, you probably are.
		We get a lot of rain that time of the year.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, well, of course, we have our problems for a while in the southwest, but most of the year it's good.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, most of the year it's pretty good.
		But that time of the year, we get a lot of rain in this part of the country.
		And it was the first clear night we'd had in about a week and a half because of all the rain.
		And anyway, I'd go out to look at the two comets.
		And I had finished with the first one and realized I had about an hour to wait before the other comet rose above my house.
		So I have an hour to kill.
		And it was a gorgeous night.
		It can be very beautiful in this part of the country.
		And I thought I'd just pass the time by looking at some star clusters, gas clouds, various objects like that in the Milky Way, including in Sagittarius.
		And I turned a telescope towards one star cluster in Sagittarius and looked at the eyepiece, and I happened to see a little fuzzy thing nearby.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A little fuzzy thing nearby.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And I guess we should explain to people, and I'm a layman now, and so you'll have to help me, but fuzzy, stars shouldn't be fuzzy, should they?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		No, they're not.
		Stars are little points of light.
		Presuming you've got everything focused right, don't you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		Fuzzy thing means generally what?
		Corona or is it coma?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It could mean a lot of things.
		There's a lot of fuzzy objects in the sky, star clusters, galaxies, gas clouds.
		And the sky is riddled with these things, as any would-be comet discoverer quickly learned.
		So the sky is completely littered with these things, which is why we have star atlases which tell us what's where.
		And which is one of the very first things I did was to check my star atlases to see if there was anything plotted in that position.
		And there didn't seem to be anything.
		There was a star cluster that I was looking at.
		Of course, that was definitely.
		But there wasn't anything plotted around it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There wasn't supposed to be a fuzzy thing there.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It didn't seem to be.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		So the one dead giveaway for a comet is a comet will move against the background stars over a period of a couple of hours.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Since they're members of the solar system.
		So I went ahead and just sketched the little fuzzy thing in the stars that were around it.
		And then went into my office to see, you know, go through all the catalogs just to make sure there was nothing cataloged in that position.
		There didn't seem to be anything.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When did your heart begin to beat a little faster?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It was starting to, I guess, to do this as I was going along on kind of a gradually increasing basis.
		I did one other check because I wanted to see if there were any known comments in that position.
		So I logged on to the Internet, logged onto the computer at the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or the world's clearinghouse for reporting and announcing comet discoveries.
		They have all the information that's necessary there.
		Ran their comet identification program to see if there were any comets in that position.
		It said there were none.
		So it was very interesting by this point.
		I've got an object.
		It doesn't seem to be anything listed at position, either galaxies or comets or anything.
		I actually did send a tentative email to the Central Bureau telling him I had a possible comet at that point.
		And then I went outside and looked through the eyepiece of the telescope and I saw beyond all doubt that the thing had moved.
		So I knew I had a comet at this point.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So now you know you've got a comet.
		At this point, one question would be, why does Alan Hale get to discover a comet when there's all these great big university telescopes out there?
		I mean, gigantic telescopes, and yet Alan Hale in his backyard is finding this comet and they're not.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		How come?
		Usually the large telescopes at the observatories like Kit Pape, Palma, or Mauna Kea, all these places around the world, they're very large instruments with very small fields and they're dedicated to looking at very specific objects.
		And they're not engaged in survey work.
		You know, covering large areas of the sky.
		Somebody has research projects where they're looking at very specific objects.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So then it's actually more likely that an amateur would discover a comet than one of the university telescopes?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		So now at this point, you think you've got a comet.
		What are the odds that somebody else, the mysterious, I might add, Mr. Both and I'm going to ask you about that, would discover a comet at exactly the same time?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Ordinarily they would be pretty slim.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		But since this comet was next to a fairly well-known star cluster, really anyone who was looking at that star cluster at that same time, that same night, should have seen the same object.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would have gone, wow, what's that?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		In fact, I was surprised that there was only one other report.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, so was that report lodged roughly at the same time prior to you, just after you, or how did that work?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It was after me.
		Tom Pop actually saw the object right around the same time I did.
		We were certainly within a few minutes of each other.
		And to be truthful, neither one of us really knows who was first because neither of us bothered to check our watches at that particular point in time.
		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Two excited, I'm sure.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but I had an unfair advantage over Tom.
		I work at home.
		My computer is here.
		I went inside and sent an email pretty quick.
		Tom was in the desert 90 miles away from anywhere.
		Had to hop into his car and drive home and send a telegram.
		So my report beat his by a few hours.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So I take it at some point then, after they had come back to you and told you, oh, yes, you found a comet.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Guess what, folks?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You found a comet.
		Then how do they arbitrate what the comet is to be called, the namesake, how it all shakes out?
		Who arbitrates that?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Well, there's a long-standing tradition that goes back over two centuries now that comets are named after the people who discover them.
		Sure.
		There is now a committee of astronomers who are members of the International Astronomical Union who are tasked with responsibility of naming a comet.
		And the usual procedure now is we wait a few days till we get an orbit for the comet to make sure it's not some long-lost object that's been lost.
		We don't want to add a bunch of names to it unnecessarily.
		So as soon as we have an orbit for a comet, they will then go ahead and name it.
unidentified		And so this is usually two or three days.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, I've got a whole series of questions about Halebop.
		The first one is even some major university astronomers were puzzled that Halebop went out beyond the orbit of Venus, you know, way out there, seemed to be so bright, unaccountably bright, outgassing like crazy, more outgassing than should occur for the amount of energy available from the sun to be causing that.
		And for that reason, a lot of them back then were saying, we think this is first time round for Haleba.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		No, they really weren't quite saying that.
		The comet was definitely very active and very bright.
		In fact, unprecedentedly bright for a comet at that distance.
		Although we do occasionally see comets that have outbursts which blow off material for reasons, which we don't entirely understand yet at that distance.
		There is factors one comet that travels around the sun in almost circular orbit between Jupiter and Saturn.
		And usually it's a very dim object, but every once in a while, every once or twice a year or so, blows off material, brightens up for two or three weeks, and then kind of fades around again until six or eight months later when it blows again.
		And there were some thought that the comet was actually something like this.
		Tom and I just happened to spy this thing when it was going through such an outburst like that.
		And of course, it turns out it wasn't.
		The comet continued to brighten at that point.
		It didn't fade away.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So then we don't really fully understand the physics behind what can cause that kind of an outburst that far away from an energy source that could cause it, huh?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, there clearly are packets of fallatil materials underneath the surfaces of these dirty snowballs, as it were.
		There was some question for a little while as to what was driving all this activity.
		We knew it couldn't be water.
		We know the main constituent of a comet nucleus is water, and we're definitely too far out at that point, part of the solar system, for water to start sublimating.
		So there was a question for a month or two exactly what was causing all the activity.
		Once some people were able to observe this with the appropriate radio telescopes, they were able to see the signatures of carbon monoxide.
		And carbon monoxide will sublimate at the temperatures at which the comet was experiencing at that time.
		So we had a handle within a month or so that, yeah, the activity we're seeing is driven by carbon monoxide.
		The question that I think was in a lot of our minds then was, well, is this really just a carbon monoxide-rich comet?
		How's the water ratio compared to carbon monoxide?
		That we had to wait about a year before we really started seeing water kick in in earnest, which it did.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How big is Hillbob?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Good question.
		We really don't know.
		We see we can't really see the nucleus in this thing.
		The cloud of material around it is just so thick that we really just can't see the nucleus.
		If we could do, like we did with Halley 11 years ago, send a spacecraft bite, take images, it's very easy to get a nucleus by that way.
		Comet Yakuchake a year ago came by close enough to the Earth.
		People out at JPL were able to bounce radar beams off the nucleus and get a return signal and get a size estimate that way.
		But we can't do that with Hillbop.
		We're not sending any spacecraft out to it, unfortunately.
		And it's not coming close enough to the Earth to do a radar experiment, unfortunately.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How about a best guess?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		The best guess we have right now, and this was taken with Hubble Space Telescope images back in the fall of 1995.
		With a few assumptions thrown in, the diameter we came up with was something like 40 kilometers or 25 miles.
		But there are so many assumptions that went into that figure that even people came up with it said take it with a grain of salt.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Early on, when the comet was first discovered, they were coming up with some pretty big figures, I recall, over 100 miles in diameter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And that still really could be.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Probably not.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I think the Hubble data that we got from the fall of 95 that I was just referring to suggests an upper limit of about 70 kilometers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		70 kilometers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Still a big piece of ice.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Still a pretty big piece of ice.
		Again, 40 was the most likely value.
		Put that word most likely in quote marks.
		But it could be quite a bit smaller.
		It depends on how much the surface is active and a lot of things that we really can't tell.
		We had to make a few assumptions.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, to dispel all rumors that have been floating around on the internet for a long time, I have a little stack of them here that talk about course corrections.
		Okay.
		I take it that you've not noted any course corrections thus far with a hailbomb.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Let me tell you what I believe is for the probable start of that whole business.
		Once the comet's discovered, the idea is what's its orbit.
		So astronomers from around the world need to be both professional and amateur astronomers.
		We'll go out and make precise measurements of its position.
		Then once we have a baseline of usually two or three days, we can calculate an orbit and see what the comet's doing.
		How far out is it?
		How close is it going to get to the sun, Earth, and so on?
		Halebaugh presented a very difficult case because it was so far out, it was very difficult to get any kind of a decent orbit for it.
		In fact, the first orbit, which was published, I guess, three or four days after its discovery, did indicate that it was far out and was coming in close, but that it was so uncertain.
		I mean, really, they had almost nothing to work with.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So in other words, as they refined the orbit of Hailbob, it appeared to some people that these were course corrections.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		It was actually just a refinement of the orbit based on the data.
		It was really almost two weeks before Brian Marshall at the Central Bureau was able to finally get a valid, decent orbit out of the data he had.
		I mean, the original orbit that was published a week and a half earlier was based on almost nothing, but they wanted to get some kind of an orbit out just to have a vague idea of what this thing is doing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		In my lifetime, there have been a number of comets that have really been given big billing.
		Boy, the media just went bonkers, and this is going to be the most incredible thing you ever saw.
		And it poops out.
		And that has happened several times in my life.
		Hayakotake was kind of an interesting surprise.
		But finally, we have a comet that is either meeting or exceeding the expectations.
		And the media, for some reason, is so silent about it.
		And we'll address that.
		Bottom of the hour.
		That's what I want to ask you about when we come back.
		You remember that, folks?
		You remember it?
		It's got to be the comet of the century with these other comets.
		And then all of a sudden, it just sort of is like somebody turns the dimmer down and it doesn't meet expectations.
		Well, guess what?
		This one does.
		All these other years of publicity about comets, there were going to be a big deal and pooped out totally.
		And here, your comet or everybody's comet is really living up to or exceeding expectations.
		And I guess that, too, is a question.
		And we're not getting the big net worth publicity that we ought to be getting.
		What's going on?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I'm not sure I entirely agree with that contention, although I guess I have a biased viewpoint.
		I would like to see this thing get as much publicity as it absolutely could.
		And if you had Been around me, say, the past three or four weeks or so, and listened to my phone ring off the wall, you would dispute the contention that's not getting any publicity.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, when I said that, I guess I meant I don't see it.
		Well, all right, you give me the name.
		What was the name of that big comet that pooped out?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		You may be referring to Comic Cahotec back in the early 1970s.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I certainly am.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And the networks, NBC, ABC, CBSA, were all hyping it up like crazy.
		It's going to be incredible.
		And then it pooped out.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, although I don't know how much, I don't remember how long before its actual pre-display the press really started coming out in the big.
		My experience has been the public seems to have a rather short attention span.
		And even though we've known about Hailbot for a year and a half, and we've known that at least it possessed the potential for a decent display for that long, it seemed like nobody was paying too much attention to it, with a few exceptions, I guess you being one of them, until fairly recently.
		Now, my experience is now that the press is discovering this thing.
		And I have had phone calls and interviews with CNN.
		I've had discussions with some of the networks already, some of the major news magazines and so on.
		So it is starting to get some publicity right now.
		Of course, here we are approaching peak display within the next month or so.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		That is the next question.
		What's forecast?
		If you can do a comet forecast.
unidentified		Okay.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Keep in mind there's always an amount of guesswork involved.
		And as my good friend David Levy, who's the Levy and Shoot Make a Levy 9, by the way, he has a quote that I really love to use.
		And that's, comets are like cats.
		They have tails and they do whatever they want.
		And there's a lot of truth to that.
		Oh, yes, there is.
		The comet is closest to the Earth on March 22nd and closest to the sun on April 1st, which means that, theoretically speaking, the comet should be brightest right around the end of this month, the beginning of April.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Which is the more important date, the proximity to Earth or the proximity to the sun?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I don't really think there's either that's really more important than the other.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In terms of possible brightness.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Probably the sun.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The sun.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It's probably more important than the proximity to the Earth.
		Although this is such a big bright comet, I don't think either specific date is more important than any other one.
		True.
		My feeling is that the comet will probably be at its best by maybe the second week of April for a couple of reasons.
		One is the comet, by that time, gets high and well placed in the evening sky.
		And for some strange reason, people are much more willing to go out and see something in the evening than they are to get up before dawn and look at something.
		True.
		Also, usually a comet will have its best dust tail development after it has rounded the sun and is heading back out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can I ask a dumb pedestrian question?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When you're looking at the comet and it is closer to the horizon, would it be true that you're looking through an awful lot more atmosphere than when it gets up higher and you're looking more or less, not straight up, but more or less vertically?
unidentified		Yes.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		So comet is, and for me all objects in the sky for that matter, are more prominent when they're above the horizon, so you're not looking through as much crud.
		Okay.
		And so by the second week of April or so, the comet is well up above the horizon.
		It's not as close.
		It's higher up.
		And you've got, at least if this comet follows the traditional thing that comets are supposed to do, whether or not this one will do it, it remains to be seen.
		You'll probably have our longest and our brightest tail right around that time.
		It seems to be the tail makes the comet more than anything else, at least to the average person.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I don't know about that.
		I guess I would have said that before I saw yours or ours or whoever it belongs to.
		It is spectacular.
		In fact, people have no idea, those who've been too lazy so far, to get up early and lose a little sleep and go out and look.
		I took my wife out, who has seen a comet or two, Aidadaki and others, and I took her out about a week and a half ago, and she said, holy smokes, or some derivation of that.
		And that's how surprised she was and how dramatic it is.
		I mean, it really is dramatic.
		Now, as you know, I got a really nice mead for Christmas telescope.
		And I find less magnification to provide a better view of the common.
		I can't quite figure out why that is.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Okay, usually when you have a telescope, on an object this size, you're actually cutting your field down too much.
		You want really as wide a field as you can to grab it more of the outside detail, especially when you start looking at the tails, some of these maybe lower brightness structures.
		When you're putting on a telescope like that and putting on a magnification, you're almost looking right through it.
		And that really kind of tends to lessen the contrast and you're not getting as much.
		Now, a telescope will certainly give you a lot of very exciting views of what's going on in the middle of the coma.
		Yeah, if you've got...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you're correct about that.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, in fact, you might have also seen there's a lot of jets going off in that comet, an incredible amount of activity going on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		As a matter of fact, Doctor, the recent space shuttle mission, there was radio commentary, and others have said that they see two tails.
unidentified		Mm-hmm.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can that be?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I'm seeing two tails myself.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you are?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		The tails are made of different substances.
		The one tail is made of ionized gas.
		As the comet gets closer to the sun, the solar wind starts to ionize some of the molecules that are being blown off the nucleus.
		The solar wind blows that back.
		So you're seeing ions.
		In a way, it's almost like a neon sign that you're seeing, except different chemicals, different molecules.
		And that is the tail.
		It's the dimmer of the tail, at least to the eye.
		It's the one that kind of hangs straight.
		It's the one that's to the north, or if you're in the northern hemisphere, it's the one that's on the left side and hanging straight.
		The molecules tend to fluoresce in the blue part of the spectrum where our eyes aren't all that sensitive.
		So it looks dim to the eye, although if you're in the dark side, you can see it pretty easily.
		The other tail is made of dust particles that have been blown off the surface of this nucleus and then getting being blown off the comet itself.
		Each little dust particle goes into its own orbit around the sun, and they tend to lag behind the comet a little bit.
		So you'll see this very broad, curved tail, and that's the dust tail.
		And since that's reflecting sunlight, that tail tends to be brighter to our own eyes than the other tail.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Fascinating.
		And there were some early pictures taken of the comet that could use some explaining.
		One was on the Hailbop.com site itself called Hailbop's Eyes.
		What's your best take on what that was?
		It seemed to show two equally bright comets side by side.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I took a brief look at that picture.
		My feeling is that that was just probably an artifact in the electronic CCD camera that was used.
		I happened to be looking at the comet that very same night that that photo was taken, and there I didn't see anything unusual about it.
		So more than likely, at least my feeling is, is that it was just an artifact, cosmic ray hits, an artifact in the processing of CCD images.
		I'm not an expert really in taking CCD images, but I've taken some.
		And a lot of cosmic ray hits, just glitches in the software can produce things like this.
		So it's not all that unusual.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I want to read you something and see if this makes any sense to you and have you explain what it means to me.
		Here we go.
		This is written by an astronomer named Mike.
		I can't identify better than that.
		We lost 3.5 days of our recent observing run due to a winter storm, but managed to obtain a total of six hours observing on the comet.
		The water production rate is running about 1E31 molecules slash per second, and the spectral lines are bright.
		However, the continuum long word of 3 UM, whatever that is, has brightened enormously, enormously since January 21st.
		So the line continuum brightness ratio is small.
		This is getting tough.
		Typically 0.1 for bright lines.
		This is similar to Komet Hayataki during the IRTF TO team survey in mid-April of 96, in contrast sharply with our PI team Don't Fall Asleep Folks data of March 23rd and 24th.
		We believe, this is the interesting line, we believe we are seeing the signature of organic grain emission in the continuum intensity versus wavelength.
		What does that mean?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Organic molecules simply mean molecules which contain carbon.
		There are a lot of substances which contain carbon.
		Of course, a lot of the chemicals within our own bodies are carbon compounds.
		So there's this impression, which is maybe half true, that we're talking organic chemistry and organic compounds, we're talking life, because life is carbon-based.
		But there are plenty of other compounds which contain carbon, which really have nothing to do with life.
		Hydrocarbons, smog, formaldehyde, and various other substances of that nature.
		We know that comets contain a fair amount of organic materials.
		During the Halley, the return of Halley 11 years ago, specifically the spacecraft flybys, like the European Space Agency's Giotto mission, detected a large number of organic molecules in and around Halley.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, then, let's back way up and let me ask you, what is a comet?
		I mean, I know it's made of ice and some of the rice things we've talked about, but why do we have comets cosmically?
		Where are they from?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Okay, they are the leftovers from the days that the planets in the solar system formed about four and a half billion years, years ago.
		If you look out in space, you will see large clouds of gas and dust scattered in various locations.
		And these dust clouds very often are sites of active star formation.
		You see clumps starting to break off, starting to collapse.
		As they collapse and start to spin up, the material will start to fall into a disk surrounding the central star.
		And so you have a large dust disk, if I said that right, in orbit around a star.
		And give this pro as these things orbit around the sun, each dust grain, eventually one dust grain will collide with another dust grain and stick together.
		Now you have a bigger dust grain, which has more gravity than anything else, and so it is able to attract another dust grain.
		So then you have yet a bigger dust grain.
		And give this process a few million years to go on.
		You eventually have large chunks of material, maybe a few miles across.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Like when you made a ball of aluminum when you were a kid out of little.
		All right.
		Is this then part of a continuing process of creation?
		Or is it a result of the old Big Bang?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		No, this is the Big Bang.
		When we talk about the Big Bang, we're actually talking about the formation of the entire universe, which preceded us by some time.
		We're talking processes which have been taking place since then, the actual formation of stars.
		And some of the elements that we see in the gas and dust positive interstellar space actually are the result of older stars, which have gone supernova and blew a lot of material into space and enriched the gas and dust we see in space.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've seen some pictures taken from Hubble of what appear to be the actual birthing of stars, some of the most incredible photographs I've ever seen.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there's that one that I call the lava lamp image that's a real gorgeous image.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It really is.
		And is that what it is, the formation, the actual birth of stars?
		Do you believe that's what we're seeing?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it is what we're seeing.
		I mean, of course, the star formation process is something which takes place over a period of tens of millions of years.
		And, of course, we're here, you know, our existence rate is a very tiny fraction of that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		So if we were able to come back and look at that exact same part of the sky five million years from now, we would see it looking quite a bit different.
		We'd see stars there that we don't really see right now because those stars will have formed, will start to have blown some of their dust envelopes away, and so on.
		I mean, this is a process which on our human time scale takes an enormously long amount of time, although on an astronomical time scale, it's actually not that long.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doctor, in the universe, do you think it's more likely that life is prolific or non-existent on the scale that we have it here on Earth?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		In a way, this is a matter of opinion because we have a sample of one to work with.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Although, depending on how the results are, the Martian fossils that were putatively announced last year, that may give us a sample of two if that turns out to be verified.
		But my own personal feeling is that we know life got started here on the Earth, and it's hard to believe that life would be so rare, the processes would actually be so rare that it would only take place once.
		The same physics and the same chemistry that works here on Earth should work everywhere else throughout the universe.
		If life got started here, life should therefore get started as long as the environmental conditions are suitable anywhere, really, not in the universe.
		So my own feeling is that there is probably a lot of life throughout the universe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Creation, evolution, common, not rare.
		Okay, enter the comet.
		Now, is it possible that a comet, you remember when you're a kid and you had a daisy and you went and the seeds went everywhere?
		Is a comet possibly a sort of a Johnny, a universal Johnny apple seed delivering the seeds of life?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that idea has been batted around occasionally.
		I don't think there's a lot of support or a lot of evidence for that particular idea.
		One idea which does have some support among a lot of astronomers is we know that one of the primary constituents of a comet is water.
		Right.
		We know that the Earth has a fair amount of water, and we know that the Earth was formed by the colliding of these chunks that I was referring to a few minutes ago over a period of tens to hundreds of millions of years.
		And, of course, during the millions of years that have elapsed since its formation, we know that comets have hit it, and the comets have delivered water.
		They must have delivered water, since that's what they're made of, to the Earth.
		So it is very possible that at least some amount of the Earth's water that we have right now is due to cometary impacts over its history.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there any other way you can imagine that there appears to be water on the moon?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		That would be by far the most likely source of it.
		Keeping in mind that the reports that came out last year, which I'm sure are the ones that you're referring to, the Clementine data, we haven't verified that that's water ice yet.
		We've got an interesting radar signal.
		In fact, it was the result of a deliberate search.
		But that's really all it is right now.
		Now, the Lunar Prospector mission, which is supposed to be launched later this year, is designed to verify that one way or the other, whether or not we're actually seeing water ice at the Moon's South Pole.
		If we do, cometary impacts is almost certainly where that water came from.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How big were the chunks of Shoemaker-Levy 9 as compared to what we believe the size of Hailbop to be?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Hailbop appears to be much larger.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Much larger.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		The largest chunk which hit Jupiter from Shoemaker-Levy 9, I've seen various figures on this, but the one I've seen the most common was probably on the order of about one kilometer across.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		One kilometer?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Not all that big, really.
		Of course, there were 20-some chunks of various sizes, and that was about the largest one, so the overall object may have been three or four kilometers or so.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, check me if I'm wrong, but I believe that I read somewhere that the marks left on Jupiter that we were able to observe from these impacts were some of which were the size of Earth?
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Size of Earth?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		I don't know if you had a chance to actually see those.
		Those big scars were visible in a pretty small telescope.
		It was amazing.
		Fantastic to see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So then it leads me to the question, should, which it will not, hailbop impact Earth or the moon or something, even Mars, what would happen?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		The planet would go on its merry way.
		I beg your pardon?
		The moon or Earth or whatever object got hit would just go on its merry way.
		I mean, yeah, hailbop is a large object for a comet, say, but compared to the mass of, say, the Earth, it's nothing.
		It's trivial.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's not even worth...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, would we go on our merry way?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		No, we would not.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We wouldn't, eh?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it would be pretty bad news for any life forms on the Earth.
		The Cretaceous-Tertiary impact of 65 million years ago, which most of us have now come to believe was what caused the dinosaurs to die out, was probably an object quite a bit smaller than Halebop.
		I think the estimates that I've seen usually say something like six miles or so.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, and we're a whole lot smaller than dinosaurs.
		Doctor, stand by.
		We'll be back to you.
		This is CBC.
unidentified		CBC.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Saturn-like object, the companion, spaceships following Hillbob, blah, blah, blah.
		We could go on and on.
		How did you react?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		The first indication I got of anything like this was the morning after the broadcast of your show where this was discussed.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		There was a radio station in Cincinnati called me about 8 o'clock that morning and asked, what do you think about this mysterious spacecraft that's following your comet?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And what did you say?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Say what?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Say what?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sure.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		And I started getting phone calls and emails all day long from all over the place asking my opinion of this thing.
		I thought, well, let's see what's going on here.
		So I was finally, through some of the local media folks around here kind of pointing me where this was coming from, I finally was able to look at Mr. Schmavik's webpage, and that kind of pretty much told me everything I needed to know, except for the fact I hadn't seen the image itself.
		And finally, I was able to track down a copy of that image, and I pretty much recognized immediately what it was.
		I could tell right away it was a bright star that was in the field.
		But to me, it's not enough just to say, well, it's a bright star, because I said so.
		I went and dug up what's called the Palomar Sky Survey, has been digitized and put on the World Wide Web.
		And I went ahead and got on the web, downloaded a copy of that same part of the sky, was able to match the stars in Mr. Schrevik's image with the star field on the Palomar Sky Survey, and sure enough, there is a very bright star in the exact same position as his object.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How did he manage to get that Saturn-like appearance, or what appeared to be rings, when other stars in the same image didn't have them?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why would that have occurred?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Because it is by far the brightest star in that image.
		The other stars that are in his image are quite a bit dimmer than that.
		And essentially, once you start overexposing any stellar image on an astronomical photograph, you start to get what are called diffraction effects.
		If you look at that exact same field on the Palomar Sky Survey image that I was just referring to, you will also see diffraction spikes in the very same star.
		Again, because the star image is overexposed, and it's just a common effect.
		It's due to the optics inside the telescope itself.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Then there were kind of a series, the Courtney Brown image aside from them, there were a series of other images that seemed to beg questions, one from Japan and so forth and so on, that seemed to show anomalies of varying sorts.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And I'm sure you were presented with those or saw them.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Actually, I kind of ignored them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ignored them?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, because I knew that this object was a star, and the whole thing started because the object was a star, and people were starting to see various things and various images.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		So I was actually out of town during most of this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, comets are said.
		Now, this is mythology and legend and Native American lore, but obviously comets are said to be harbingers of change.
		And I'm sure you get a lot of that.
		Could there, you know, at the basis, at the bottom of a lot of what is called myth, there's some grain of truth.
		And let's see, comets as harbingers of change.
		Where might such a myth have come from?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Actually, it's not that hard to understand.
		Put yourself back in the shoes of someone who was living, say, 500 or 600 years ago.
		The people then were familiar, of course, with the normal night-time star patterns that they saw that we see today.
		They were familiar with the planets.
		They knew the planets moved against the background stars, but people had known of the planet for centuries at that time.
		Their motions were understood.
		Now imagine, here's this bright, impressive comet.
		You yourself are well aware of how impressive Halebop has been.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		So imagine something like this kind of appearing almost from out of nowhere sometimes.
		Being this bright, impressive, beautiful object hanging around in the sky, moving against the background stars like the planets do, but maybe in parts of the sky where the planets don't go, like Halebop is doing right now.
		And then fading off back into nowhere, say, a couple of months later.
		I think it was only natural to associate that event in the sky with anything that was happening on the Earth.
		Now, if you think about it, there's always something rotten happening on Earth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		There's always a war.
		Rulers always die.
		There's an assassination.
unidentified		There's a plague or an earthquake or you name it.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		And I think it was only natural to associate those events on Earth with the comet that was in the sky at that time.
		Forgetting that two years ago, when there was no comet in the sky, there were still bad events happening.
		But people would make association with the events that happened when the comet was in the sky.
		And comets ended up getting this bad rap that when there's a comet in the sky, something bad happens.
unidentified		And it always does because there's always something bad happening.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, maybe it's a little like the virgins tossed into the volcano business.
		Volcanoes erupt and then eventually they stop erupting.
		And if you throw a virgin in, when they stop, you might conclude, therefore, that the virgin stopped the volcano.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Same theory.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I mean, I've had somebody point out to me, kind of tongue-in-cheek, you know, comets are associated with the death of rulers sometimes.
		That's always been one of the things that comets are supposed to foretell.
		Hailbop is in the sky.
		Deng Xiaoping just died.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, he did.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, now the fact that he was 90-something may or may not have had anything to do with that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		Listen, we're heard all over the world, and I've got a fax here that says, Hi, Art, Mark from Sydney, Australia.
		Do you know, or could you please ask Alan, whether I can see Comet Hailbop in the southern skies?
		What about somebody way down in Australia?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Okay, right now he is out of luck.
		Hailbop right now is strictly a northern hemisphere object.
		But do not despair too much.
		After the comet has rounded the sun in early April, it starts to head south very quickly.
		We, in our latitudes, will lose it around the 22nd, 25th of May because it's heading south.
		Meanwhile, our good friends like Mark and Sidney will start to pick up the comet very low in their northwest about the beginning of May, and as the weeks progress, it will get higher in the southern hemisphere sky and should still be fairly bright at that time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		However, it is at that point leaving the proximity of the sun, right?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So it's going to be fading.
		It will probably have faded some by that point.
		But it should still be a fairly bright and impressive object.
		And in fact, going back to a comment I made a little bit earlier, it's after the comet has gone around the sun is one time when you have your best tail development.
		So they may actually have a very impressive object.
		Maybe not quite as bright as what we had in early April, but may actually have a fairly decent tail, bright tail associated with this thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you tempted to want to fly to Australia and see it from there?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I am working on a trip to do just that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'll be doing.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I may actually get to meet Mark from Sydney.
		I see.
		I've been to Australia several times.
		It's a lovely place, and I look for any excuse I can to go there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's a good one.
		All right.
		What is the best viewing time for us, and does it vary in the U.S. from where we are in the southwest, say, to the northeast corridor or Florida?
		Does it vary at all?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Not really.
		It's because the comet's basically visible in the same location from anywhere in the Earth.
		Just as the Earth turns, obviously, the hours are different depending on where you're located, whether North America or Europe or wherever.
		Right now, the comet, as you know, is a morning object, although it is far enough north now that it is starting to become visible in the evening sky during dusk, but very, very low in the northwest.
		I have not seen it myself that, because I've got mountains in that direction.
		I don't have a good horizon in that direction.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, by when would you say it will be a good evening object?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It should start becoming fairly easily visible in the evening by the 22nd, 23rd of March or so, maybe a little before that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The closest point to Earth will be how many miles?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		122 million.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		122 million miles.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Which is 1.3 times as far away as the sun is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What would have happened if the comet had been, say, as close as Hayuhutake came?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that would be wonderful.
		If the comet had actually been closest to the sun in early December, instead of beginning of April, it would have come as close to the Earth as comet Yakutake did around January 3rd of this year.
		And it would have been impressive, to say the very least, to make a major understatement.
		It would have definitely been certainly brighter than the planet Venus by far.
		It may have had a tail which stretched a good halfway all the way across the sky.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my goodness.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It would have been a stupendous sight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are we likely to get, you know, it's impossible to say, I suppose, but are we likely to get another comet as neat as Halebop is right now in our lifetime?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It's possible.
		Great comets tend to come about once every ten years or so on the average.
		We had Comet West in 1976, which was a beautiful object in the morning sky.
		And then we didn't really have anything for 20 years, and then Comet Yagutake came by a year ago.
		Although that was really more of an ordinary comet, which just happened to come very close to the Earth, and we were able to view the tail in such a way as to have a phenomenally long tail across the sky.
		But by my definition, that was certainly a great comet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, one of the things that I remember about that comet, and I try to follow these things from a layman's point of view, I found it very interesting.
		They said, ooh, surprise, surprise, Hayaki is emitting X-rays.
		Why would a comet emit X-rays?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		That is a good question.
		We really don't know for sure.
		That was a definite surprise.
		And we still, although, now let me make a disclaimer here.
		I'm not exactly an expert on all the different emissions which come from comets, although I do know a fair amount about it.
		My understanding is we still don't really have a mechanism yet for what is causing the X-rays to be emitted.
		For a while, it was thought we might just be seeing reflections of the sun's X-ray emission, which the Sun does give off X-rays.
		We thought we might be seeing reflections.
		I understand that there's been some observations since then, which kind of tend to refute that.
		One of the interesting things is that once the X-rays were found in comet Hyakutake, some researchers went back and looked through some old data taken by some of the X-ray satellites like ROSAT and a couple of the others and identified X-ray emission in some older comets which you've been by over the past several years.
		But no one had really even thought to look for it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So in other words, it's likely this is a regular occurrence and nothing specific to higher catalogs.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And although I don't believe anyone's detected X-rays in Halebop yet, I don't think anyone's looked for it yet.
		I know there are proposals out there at plans to look for X-rays from Halebop when it gets a little bit closer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		This may be out on a limb time here, but I'll ask you about it.
		There are a lot of people who have theories about an energy that is in space here, all around us.
		They call it zero-point energy, and that an object traveling through space, a mass traveling through space, would interact with this energy.
		And could that be one explanation for a source of energy to produce the emission of X-rays?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm not really sure I can comment on that because I'm not really familiar with the idea.
		I kind of tend to discount it.
		Would not the Earth do the same thing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Would not the Sun produce energy because the Sun itself is traveling through space?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I would think so.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		And, of course, we do know the Sun gives off X-rays, but that's due to processes going on within its atmosphere, which causes that to happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, if it's a snowball and there's water and there's various things, it's just hard to imagine where X-rays would come from.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They're a very short wavelength.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it probably has to do with some of the ionization processes that are going on.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Again, as these substances like the water, some of the other substances, like carbon monoxide and these other volatiles that I was talking about, as they ionize, we may be seeing an ionization effect, but I'm just kind of speculating in the dark right here, so don't put too much treasure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's fine.
		Oh, look, this is the home of that.
		Feel free.
		What do you think of the idea of a space mission?
		We don't seem to have many space goals these days anymore.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Unfortunately.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's right.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I agree.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		To land on a comet.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I think it'd be fascinating.
		That has been investigated in some of the better science fiction novels I've read.
		I think it'd be fascinating to really get a first-hand look at what's going on on some of these things and actually seeing these eruptions of material going on and what have you.
		I think it'd be fascinating.
		I mean, I've read a couple of science fiction novels where that theme has been addressed when Halley comes around again in the year 2061.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Could it be done?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It certainly could be.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		The question is: do we have the willpower to do so?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The political will, and the money, that's an entirely different question.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you saddened as I am by the great pullback that we've made since the Apollo days?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I would certainly have to say that I am.
		Of course, I'm giving away a secret here, but I was 11 years old when Armstrong and Aldrin, it's early in the morning here, walked on the moon.
		And, of course, I was raised during the, I was in the elementary school during the 60s.
		And, of course, this was after Sputnik, which kind of scared the pants off for the Americans.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure did.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		And, of course, that kind of fed the whole Apollo project to begin with.
		And I remember watching the Gemini flights and the early Apollo flights.
		And, of course, I do remember very vividly watching the Apollo 11 mission on a black and white TV we had now in Florida at the time.
		And I really had every reason to believe that I was looking at a preview of my own future.
		And I thought, you know, gee, when I'm those guys' age, I'm going to be off doing things far better than they were.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But it's like it skipped a generation.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, in fact, I am right now about a month or two older than Neil Armstrong was when he was walking on the moon.
		I've got about another month to go, and I'll catch up to what Dave said Baul Galdrin was at when he was walking on the moon.
		And obviously, we're not there.
		I think it's been very frustrating.
		There's a major pullback in a lot of ways.
		Certainly science education, I think.
		The way science is being funded in this country.
		It's a large discussion here.
		It's a very deep subject, and there's certainly a lot of things.
		Of course, Apollo was not really science-driven.
		It was politically driven.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's true.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it was driven by politics.
		Beat the Russians.
		I mean, that was the whole goal of Apollo, was beat the Russians.
		And we got a lot of tremendous good science from Apollo, but that was not the reason it was done.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There also was a news story in the last couple of days, just in case we do happen to go back to Mars, and we're making some attempts now, and collect samples that those samples on return would have to be quarantined because they're worried about infection of Earth by some microbial agent from Mars.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that a prudent thing to do?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I believe it is.
		It would seem unlikely, but again, it goes back to the fact that when we're talking about life, we have a sample of one to work with.
		And you can't do very good statistics from a sample of one.
		So we really have no idea how any potential life form that would arise in another environment would interact with the life forms we have here on Earth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So it's prudent to be careful.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Doctor, we're at the bottom of the air, so let's go.
		Okay, okay.
		When we come back, I'm going to ask you about that movie, Asteroid, and the research you've done on close Earth objects.
		This is CBC.
		As part of his bio, I noted earlier when I read it, it indicates he is also interested in the present efforts to identify potential Earth-impacting asteroids and comets, and is currently engaged in initiating a search program for these objects to be conducted from southern New Mexico, and which will include participation by school students and the general public.
		In other words, lots of eyes.
		And Alan, did you happen to see the movie Asteroid?
		Alan, are you there?
		Hello, Alan.
		Oh, boy, I've lost Alan.
		Okay, well, I warned him at the beginning of the program that such a thing could occur.
		So, what I'm going to have to do is what I do when things like this happen is get him back on the line.
		So, if you will all stand by a moment, we will retrieve Dr. Hale and be right back.
		You would think that they treat somebody with a last name like Bell better than they do me, but we got cut off.
		Anyway, I think we're back together again.
		Dr. Hale?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, good.
		I'm sure you missed what I said, which is a shame.
		What I was saying was that in your bio, you have begun a project looking for objects, comets, asteroids that might impact with Earth, and you're getting school children and so forth in the American public involved in that.
		And I'm all for that.
		Did you see the movie Asteroid?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I did.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I expected to get some questions about it, so I plunked myself down in front of the tube for a few hours and watched it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		So did I, and I thought, by the way, it started out at least dramatically very well.
		And by the time that movie was over, had I been there, I'd have stepped on that little kid's hands and let him drop into the crater.
		I was so angry at him.
		I mean, it's like he went on a straight B-line for the ground zero impact point.
		I was so angry.
		Anyway, obviously, there are things out there that could impact Earth.
		We've had a few close calls, and I've been doing talk radio a long time, Doctor, and I remember several years ago hearing several reports about, guess what, folks?
		Scientists just announced that two days ago we had a very, very close call with an object, and we heard about it two days after it passed our orbit near Earth.
		What are the chances that in our lifetimes, in our lifetimes, something or another pretty big will hit Earth?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It depends on the size of the object.
		If you're talking something that's 10 meters, 15 meters, we've had two hits this century that we know of, both were in Siberia.
		If we're talking larger objects, say 100 meters or so, I'm pulling a number out of the air here, but perhaps every few thousand years we'll have something like that, or maybe even a longer time scale than that.
		The object which made the meteor crater near Flagstaff, Arizona, was made about 49,000 years ago.
		That was about 100 meters in diameter, at least that's what Gene Shoemaker tells me.
		If we're talking about big objects that are a few miles in diameter, ones that could really wipe us out as far as the life forms here on the Earth, we're probably talking about something which happens over time scales of many millions of years, if not tens of millions of years.
		Now, the Cretaceous-Tertiary impact was 65 million years ago, and that seems to be the last really significant impact.
		So the chances of something like that happening in our lifetime are probably very remote, but it's not zero.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Let's say, for the sake of conversation, that we identified something that was headed our way, as in the movie Asteroid.
		In the movie Asteroid, I was quite surprised.
		The first time they just let this sucker come in and do what it did to Kansas City, and then they finally decided to act when they saw the second big one.
		If something the size of that second one were headed toward us, would what they did be a viable alternative?
		That is, blowing it to Smithereens, they thought.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you're not going to blow it to Smithereens.
		The best you could probably do is break it into a few smaller fragments, say a half dozen or so.
		What you do, I think, depends entirely on how much lead time you have.
		If we have some decent survey efforts going on, of which we're starting to initiate some now, we may very well have a 50 or 100-year warning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, really?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		That's something.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Once you identify an object and you calculate its orbit, you can compute its orbit for an indefinite period of time to the future.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've never been shot with a bullet, but I am told that when you are, you never hear the rifle shot from the bullet that hits you, and that asteroids might be a little bit like that, ones that are headed directly for you.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Are they harder to see?
		If something is coming directly towards you, yes, it would be pretty difficult to see simply because the way we detect asteroids is we detect their motion against the background stars.
		If there's something coming directly at you, it's kind of hard to see that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, there is no relative horizontal motion.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		There's not much to speak of.
unidentified		Yeah.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		So the idea, of course, is you want to find them ahead of time before that really happens.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Plus an asteroid is a big, just black rock, and space is black, and I know that may be oversimplified, or is it?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		That's oversimplified because the moon is a fairly black object.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		But it does reflect sunlight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's true.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		But it only I don't remember the exact percentage here, but I think it's something like it's less than 10%, maybe as low as 4% of the light that, the sunlight that throws on the moon.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		The moon is still a bright object in our sky.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know something about our space program.
		If there were an object out there, let's say we had weeks of warning, several weeks of warning might be reasonable.
		And it occurred right now.
		Today we found it.
		Would we be able to do anything significant about it?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Probably not.
		If you had years of warning, you could go out and perhaps stick a little rocket engine on the thing and give it a bit of a nudge.
		If you give it a bit of a nudge now, 50 years from now, that nudge makes a big difference.
		on the other hand, you have a few weeks of warning, there's probably not much you can do.
		Theoretically, you could maybe launch a few nuclear warheads at the thing.
		What's going to happen is you're going to break it into a few smaller fragments.
		So you have a choice.
		Do you have one real big object coming at you?
		Do you want a half dozen smaller ones coming at you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there a big difference?
		In other words, one larger object be a total planet killer if you divided that into six objects, then are you better off?
		Or does it just take out more cities on more continents?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		A large object hitting you, say a six-mile-across object, would probably be a planet killer, at least in terms of those significant life forms on the planet.
		A smaller object that we're talking about may wreak havoc over part of a continent, as it were.
		So you'd have, say, a half dozen hits, some of them which would be in water, which would create tidal waves and wipe out a few coastal areas and coastal cities.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So if we had an object a few weeks out right now, and you were the one in charge of what to do about it, what would you do?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Oh, well, you're going to put that responsibility on my shoulders.
		Sure.
		Well, if I had the ability to do that, I would probably opt to go ahead and try to break it into smaller fragments.
		At least it would have some survival that way, I think, whereas you'd have almost a certain planet-wide catastrophe if the whole object hit its one piece.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So if you discount the last ugly dramatic camp of that movie, the premise of the movie wasn't all that far off then.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		In some respects, no, because the threat is there.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		On the other hand, the way the asteroids got here, the comet perturbing their orbits, that's completely absurd.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it is?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I was going to ask about that.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		A comet does not have enough mass to do anything like that.
		A comet's kind of been described in one way as about as close to nothing as you can get and still be something.
		I mean, the mass that these things have is almost negligible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's try the question the other way around, though.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It does the orbit of the comet does become influenced by planets and suns and so forth, does it not?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I mean, Halebop's orbit was changed somewhat when it came by Jupiter a year ago.
		So, yes, the planets' gravity does affect the comets.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there a chance that the orbit of a comet Halebop or some other large comet could be perturbed in an annoying way from our point of view?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		By one of the large planets, yes.
		It's certainly possible.
		I mean, look what happened with Shoemaker, Levy 9, and Jupiter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A number of questions for you by facts, and then we'll get to the phones at the top of the hour.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		At what speed is Hillbop traveling?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		You know, I get that question all the time, and I never really sit and bother to try to figure that out.
		The speed will change depending on where it is in its orbit.
		The closer it gets to the sun, the faster it's moving.
		The further away from it is the slower it's moving.
		Right now, it is slightly beyond the Earth's distance from the sun, so it's moving at slightly less than the Earth's orbital velocity, and the Earth is moving at 18 miles a second in its orbit around the Sun, if I remember the numbers correctly.
		So right now, I put the figure for Hailbop at 12 to 15 miles a second.
		That's a number I'm pulling out of the air.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's really fast.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		When it's closest to the Sun at the beginning of April, that will increase to, I believe, 26 miles per second.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		And it'll start to slow down again.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are there any estimates on how much mass Hailbop is losing per unit of time?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I've seen some of those, and I'll say, off the top of my head, I don't have those.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It's in the number of several tons per second.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Several tons?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I believe.
		Don't quote me on that.
		It's somewhere around it.
		Of course, by our standards, you just heard me say that a comet's supposed to be nothing as you can get and still be something.
		That's on a planetary standard.
		By our own standards, a comet is still a massive object, certainly something like that.
		So it can lose figures like that and still lose a very tiny percentage of its mass.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So as it goes round and round, eventually, if it is all ice, someday it'll just be gone?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or is there a core to it?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		No, that pretty much is the core.
		There's ice, there's dust, there's organic materials and all sorts of junk.
		It's kind of a mixture of all this junk going through space.
		But yes, every time a comet goes around the sun, it loses its material, loses some of it, which never comes back to it.
		So you give a comet going around the sun enough times, and eventually it loses all its volatles and it disintegrates.
		We've seen this happen several times.
		In fact, it happened rather dramatically with a comet that appeared last fall.
		We saw this comet come in.
		It actually came bright enough to be visible to the naked eye briefly, but apparently it was a very tiny object.
		And as it came around the sun, just disintegrated.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That was it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It got used up.
unidentified		Yeah.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		There was nothing left.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Once it came back from around the sun, there was nothing there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		There have been reports of radio emissions.
		And I'm not now talking about the unambiguous intelligent signals that once said to be coming from it.
		I'm talking about in the spectrum certain radio emissions.
		Is that accurate?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Have you heard that?
		Yes.
		And almost all objects in space emit radio waves.
		The Sun, Jupiter, numerous stars, and so on.
		And comets as well.
		In fact, as the comet is getting closer to the Sun and starts to feel Sun's heat, we have some physical and chemical activity going on.
		And some of the emissions that we see are actually in the radio part of the spectrum.
		In fact, it was observations in that part of the spectrum, which were the first indications we had that it was carbon monoxide that was giving and producing activity.
		We detected carbon monoxide lines in the radio part of the spectrum.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can you tell us what part of the radio spectrum those emissions were most easily observed in?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Oh, boy, I don't have that off the top of my head.
		I believe it was in what we would almost call the microwave part of the spectrum.
		If any of my astronomy friends are hearing me, they might be groaning because I just honestly don't have that information in my head right now.
		But it's somewhere, I think, in the neighborhood of a few gigahertz.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I was going to guess at two plus gigahertz somewhere.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It's somewhere in that ballpark, I believe.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		So your forecast for this comet, and this surprised me when we talked the other day, I had thought that around April 1st at the latest, it would be at its brightest.
		But that is not necessarily so.
		The truth is, you said it could continue to brighten through April, is that right?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Through part of April.
		My feeling is its brightest will probably be right near the very beginning of April.
		It may start to fade slowly, although with who knows, these comets do weird things from time to time.
		But the tail development will probably be better towards the middle of April.
		I mean, that's, I'm kind of assuming here the comet's going to behave like a typical comet, and of course, get dangerous after a while.
		But the comet should be a brilliant object at least through the end of April, at least, and we'll actually still be bright, although fading by May and June still.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, we will not pass, or will we, through the orbit of Hillbop?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		No.
		The comet is in orbit.
		It's almost perpendicular to the Earth's orbit, and it's well above the Earth's orbit right now.
		It will pass through the plane of the Earth's orbit in early May, and that is a point outside the Earth's orbit and we're quite a ways away from it at that time.
		Again, if the comet had been closest to the sun in early December, we'd be at those respective post points at the same time, but that's the way it goes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would there be, if we pass through its tail, or the tail of any comet, would there be a resultant meteor shower or a shower of any sort?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Probably not.
		The tail is very, very thin.
		And we would not probably not see much of anything there.
		We have passed through comet tails from time to time through history, and I don't think we've had any unusual effects.
		But now, this dust that is being blown off tends to follow the comet in its orbit.
		And if we intersect that orbit from time to time, we do see meteor showers.
		There's the famous Perseid meteor shower we encounter every August, which is due to a comet that comes by every 130 years or so.
		And that's just dust grains that have been ejected, and then they just follow around the comet's orbit.
		There's the famous Leonid meteor shower, which is associated with a comet that returns every 33 years.
		And this seems to be a very tight clump, a swarm of dust that follows the comet by a year or two.
		The comet was last around in 1965.
		We had a tremendous meteor shower the following year.
		And that comet is due back in 1998.
		We may have another very tremendous shower in November of 1999, or possibly 98, possibly 99.
		Possibly not at all, but we'll have to wait and see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Here's another one for you.
		We talked about an impact on Earth of a comet or an asteroid.
		What about something that just is a real close miss?
		And by close, I mean something that wouldn't hit the Earth, but would, in effect, just go knifing right through its atmosphere.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What would happen?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		We actually had an occurrence of that in the early 1970s.
		The object that was probably about five meters in diameter, which wasn't all that big, really, seems to have entered the Earth's atmosphere at a very shallow angle, kind of was passing south to north over the western United States.
		It got to within about 60 miles of the Earth's surface, I believe over Montana.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And I think they've got some video of that.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah, there's some dramatic video of that.
		This was in the middle of the afternoon.
		It was apparently a brilliant object.
		And then just kind of spooted on back into space.
		It didn't do anything to the Earth other than turn some people's attention toward this thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about something, say, a mile or so wide doing the same thing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Something the size of a hailbop doing that?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Oh, boy.
		That's an interesting question.
		I'm not sure I can give the best answer to that.
		Certainly something past, let's say Hailbop's 25 miles an hour diameter, let's work that figure, and it passes 60 miles from the Earth.
		It would probably create a lot of heat, a lot of friction, and could produce a few forest fires over good parts of the Earth.
		It would not be the complete devastation that we had, say, with the Cretaceous-Tertiary impact.
		But there would definitely be some effects, at least in the area under which it passed.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We would regard it as a bad day.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		We'd regard it a bad day, especially if you were in the area under which it passed.
		You'd probably be holding your breath because I'm not sure we'd be able to predict its path that accurately ahead of time.
		We would certainly be seeing this as a possibility of an impact, and we'd hold our breath, seeing if it really did or not.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		By the way, and this has got to be a quick answer because we're at the top of the hour, but in the movie Asteroid, they predicted that it was going to whack Kansas City.
		And I was sitting there thinking, you know, they can't even properly predict when satellites are, where they're going to impact, and they miss that by continent-size margins.
		Was that unrealistic that it would hit Kansas City?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I think we'd be able to identify a hemisphere.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Very good.
		A hemisphere.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We'll be right back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Dr. Alan Hale is my guest.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Stay right there.
unidentified		Stay right there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mexico, generally pretty good viewing country for Hailbop.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And it occurred to me, Doctor, the one thing I haven't asked you yet is a good layman's explanation for everybody out there of how to go find Hailbop in the morning.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Okay, that's actually pretty easy.
		What you do is around 4.30 or 5 o'clock in the morning, let's pick 4.30, good round even time, and go out, look in the northeast, somewhat above the horizon to the northeast, and you don't have to do anything else.
		You will see it.
		It is about the brightest object in the entire sky right now.
		I think Mars may be brighter, and Jupiter's brighter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And that's about it.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		You cannot miss it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		It is a very serious item.
		How do you think that the present brightness in the morning sky will compare to the best moment in the evening sky when it moves?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		If it continues to behave itself, that is an if, it should still be quite a bit brighter when we see it in the evening toward the end of this month in early April than it is right now.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		We still have quite a ways to go.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
		People are never going to forget this.
		And you.
		And just let me, then we'll go to the phones.
		Let me ask you about that.
		You are forevermore, forevermore, going to be associated with this comet and known by this comet.
		How do you feel about that?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It's an interesting feeling.
		Of course, that's approached.
		I still have a life to work with and live for the next several years.
		And some of the work I do with the Southwest Institute and everything.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I assume on balance, though, it is an advantage.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Oh, certainly.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I guess one of the neatest impressions for me is that we know from studying the comet's orbit that it will be back in about 2,400 years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		2,400 years.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Which means if you want to see it, you better see it now.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It's a long wait before you get a chance to see it again.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Any idea how many times she's been around?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		At least once.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		At least once.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and that was about 4,200 years ago.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		And a reason that's different from the 2,400 figure I just gave you is I mentioned a little while earlier that it passed close to Jupiter last year on its way in, and that shortened its orbit period somewhat.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are we able to predict where it will cross next time?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It will come in on pretty much the same orbit that it came in this time.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		So somebody looking in 2,400 years now should be able to find it somewhere coming up from Sagittarius.
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I could go on asking questions forever, but I'm not going to.
		I'm going to turn it to the audience.
		First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Alan Hale.
		Where are you, please?
unidentified		Hi, I'm Bob from Minneapolis.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Art.
unidentified		Morning, Dr. Hale.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		I have an interest in comets, and I'd like to ask you a question basically a little about cometary theory.
unidentified		Did the impact of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter last year, the many pieces that were all strung out, would that be a result of a single nucleus being broken up by the gravitational forces on its previous orbit, or could that possibly be a demonstration of Thomas Van Flandren's theory that the nucleuses may be composed of many pieces that are all gravitationally attracted to each other?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, good question.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I'm not extremely familiar with the Van Flandren idea.
		I think that's a fairly old one, which at least some of the more recent observations seem to have thrown out, specifically the geoto flyby of Halley back in the mid-1980s.
		The feeling by Shoemaker Levy 9 is that this was a single object.
		It has been in orbit around Jupiter since the early 1920s, and I'm kind of pulling these years out of the top of my head here.
		And on its previous close approach to Jupiter in July of 1992, it passed close enough to Jupiter that the tidal effects resulting from Jupiter's gravity were in fact able to rip it into the several pieces that we saw when the comet was discovered about a year later.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, then you don't subscribe to the Van Flanderen model, which suggests that a comet is made up of a lot of little pieces orbiting together.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I think at this point, the evidence seems to argue against that.
		Again, we have not seen much in the way of cometary nuclei.
		I guess the closest we have, again, the Giotto flyby of Hanley and the other spacecraft 11 years ago.
		And also when comet Hyakutake came by the earth a year ago, to my knowledge, there was only one signal that came back from the Goldstone and radar bounce experiment.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good answer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Anything else, Color?
unidentified		No, I'd just like to say that for all the listeners, get out and see this comet.
		It's one of the most spectacular sights you'll ever see other than maybe a total solar eclipse.
		Those two have to be the best.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good for you.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		If you're in Mongolia, about this time, well, actually in about 20 hours from now, you will get to see both.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
		I also understand that in the middle of March, there will be a nearly full lunar eclipse.
		Will that be an interesting time to view the comet?
unidentified		Yes, it will.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		That's on the night of the 23rd.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The 23rd?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and the comet will be in the evening sky, although fairly low.
		But we'll have an almost total eclipse of the moon.
		Not quite.
		It'll be very deep partial.
		And yes, full moons have a tendency to wipe out objects like comet tails.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Everything.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		But here we'll get a brief respite while the moon is in eclipse.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So it'll be a doubly good reason to go out and take a look-see.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. Alan Hale.
		Hello, where are you, please?
unidentified		Thank you.
		Mr. Bell, this is Robert.
		I'm in the San Joaquin Valley, California.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Dr. Hale, it's a pleasure, extreme honor to meet you, sir.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		A man of history.
unidentified		True.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Ordinary guy.
unidentified		Well, sir, before I ask my one question, I feel it's an important question.
		Hopefully you can help us with it.
		I just want to quickly say, Mr. Bell, that I found out today that all Japan for the past two weeks, they have been very excited.
		The news is not telling us here in the U.S. that they found, I don't know if it's a city, 260 miles of roads over in Okinawa.
		You might want to check into that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They found what, please?
unidentified		They said that below the sea, off of Okinawa.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes, I've been hearing rumors of this for some time.
		And I think there was a guest on Laura Lee Show was talking about this.
		And I spent a decade of my life on the island of Okinawa.
unidentified		Oh, I know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'll be looking into it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Anyway, your question?
unidentified		Yes, Doctor, with the recent addition to Hubble, I heard on news releases that they are viewing Hailbob.
unidentified		Do you have any information as to what actually is going on through Hubble?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, yes, that is a good question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The new additions to Hubble, apparently better vision, able to look at different parts of the light spectrum, or I really don't know.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Specifically the infrared.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Infrared, okay.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's the main installation infrared camera.
		I'm not directly affiliated with Hubble, but my understanding is that there's a certain shakedown period to test the new instruments, make sure that everything's functioning normally, and no serious problems have developed from installing the new instruments.
		And I presume, although I'm not really in the know right here, that we're still in the middle of that shakedown period.
		As far as observing Hill Bump with Hubble is concerned right now, we have a problem in that you don't want to take a chance on pointing this expensive high-tech equipment at the sun and burning out all your detectors because you would do that immediately if you even got close to the sun.
		So there are constraints on how close can we point this instrument to the sun that we don't want to take a chance of getting anything closer.
		And that figure, as I understand it, is 50 degrees.
		And unfortunately, Hailbop is within 50 degrees of the sun right now.
		In fact, has been for three or four months and will continue to be within that 50-degree forbidden zone, as it were, for another several months and does not leave that until later this year.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So when Hailbop is close, we are not going to be able to point Hubble at it.
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that is sad.
unidentified		It is.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It would be great.
		Of course.
		We've got some interesting images of the comet coming in with Hubble.
		And I'm sure, although I guess I can't speak for the scientists who are actually going to be putting for time on this, but I'm quite sure they're going to be observing it as it recedes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let me ask you, Doctor, about a rumor that's out there that after your discovery of Halebop, along with Tom Bopp, and oh, I've kind of asked about Tom Bopp, that people went back and looked at some old plates and found Halebop from a deep space photography done by large telescopes long ago.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there anything to that?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		Once we had a decent orbit for the comet, it was then actually a simple procedure when we knew where the comet was at past times.
		And one image of the comet was identified on a photograph taken with a telescope at Sighting Spring Observatory, New South Wales, Australia, in April 1993 when it was well beyond the orbit of Saturn.
		I've seen that image.
		In fact, I reproduced that image in the book.
		And it's clearly a comet.
		It's definitely a fuzzy object thing there.
		It's clearly there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So what's the answer?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They just didn't notice?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		If you take one of these large photographs of a fairly wide field of the sky, covering quite a bit of area, and there's fuzzy objects all over it, galaxies and so on.
		Now, a comet can be noticed because during, say, a 50-minute exposure, it moves and it's trailed.
		The image is trailed.
		Well, Hillbop was so far out at that time that the trailing was negligible.
		If you look at the image very carefully, you'll see that it is trailed.
		But someone who was looking for a trail of a comet will be looking for something a lot longer than this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Fair enough.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		So possibly someone did see it, but passed it off as one of the 2,000 other galaxies which show up on that same photograph.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So they could have been the discoverer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But they weren't.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Theoretically.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		In the media, you're fairly prominent, Dr. Hale.
		Tom Bob, on the other hand, is not.
		I mean, Bob is almost like a mythical character who has never seen and never heard.
		Is there really a Mr. Bop?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		He's an incredibly nice guy.
		He's very nice.
		I had not heard of Tom.
		I don't know if he'd heard of me or not prior to that infamous night.
		Tom is an amateur astronomer who works and lives around Phoenix and was out with a few of his friends when he found the same little bulky object that I did at around the same time.
		And we've gotten to know each other.
		We've met on a few occasions.
		We've done a few joint appearances.
		And he has done a few speaking engagements on his own.
		He's a quieter guy than I am.
		He knows how to keep his mouth shut where I don't.
		But actually, he's an incredibly nice guy.
		And coping with the world pedestal that we're both kind of being put on for a while.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It really is going to be kind of an interesting couple of months for you now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Because I think even though the media at a gigantic level has not yet grasped this, they're about to.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they're in the process of doing that right now.
		I'm getting, like I say, quite a few interviews.
		I give three or four interviews a day right now.
		Really?
		And the phone does not stop ringing, and it's only going to keep getting more and more interesting.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, well, you haven't done it, so I'm going to make you do it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You have authored a book about this comet, and I think it's called Everybody's Comet.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And tell us a little about the book.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Okay, it's, of course, I had to capitalize on this thing like anyone shit.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		The next section is where do I look, how do I look, when do I look, and so on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		That's the thing that most people will probably be interested in.
		I have a brief afterward where I talk about my own personal view of this thing, what this has meant to me, what I'd like to do with this.
		Again, that's a very personal thing.
		And then I've got a few appendices, various other sources of information, a timeline.
		I had to use a few technical terms throughout the course of the book, although I tried to use those as little as I could.
		I do have a glossary which explains anything out of the ordinary.
		And an appendix about some of the work I'm doing at the Southwest Institute for Space Research, at least what I'd like to do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Where is your book available?
		How do they get it?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Okay, it should be available in bookstores.
		I know Barnes and Noble is carrying it nationwide.
		All right.
		I think some of the other change bookstores are as well.
		I know it's done a couple of book settings at a couple of these other places.
		It is directly available from the publisher.
		It's High Lonesome Books in Silver City, New Mexico.
		They have a 1-800 number.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, go ahead.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's hear it.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		1-800-380-7323.
		That's off the top of my head.
		I'm about 98% certain that that's correct.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, boy, it better be correct.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Well, I can go double check, real quick.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		At the bottom of the hour break here, you better check.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I can do that right now while we're talking.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		You know, you sort of stopped when you got toward the end there, and you said I wrote about what this comment means to me.
		So that sounds like an awfully good question.
		Phones, I'm coming to you in a second.
		Hold tight.
		The question is, Doctor, you know, on a personal level, what does this mean to you?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It's given me a chance to actually make a career out of science, I guess if I could put it in a nutshell.
		I think we talked about this a little bit earlier, that I was one of those who was inspired by Apollo and so on to go pursue a career in science, and there were quite a few of us in our generation that were inspired to do just that.
		And so we went through all the rigors of college and majoring in one of the sciences and going through graduate school.
		And let me tell you, graduate school is no picnic.
		It's definitely a lot of work.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If this turns out to be your legacy, and we'll all end up with some sort of legacy, whatever we're remembered for, it wouldn't be that bad, would it?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		No, it would not.
		Certainly getting my name on something like this.
		Of course, I'm still approaching this in the idea that I've got, I'd like to think, another 30 or 40 years of my life left.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And there's other comments out there.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Well, I've got something I want to do.
		I formed this organization, the Southwest Institute for Space Research, about three and a half years ago for the very pragmatic reason that there are no jobs for scientists these days.
		In fact, I really can't encourage any student to pursue a career in science because the employment prospects are so bad.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's awful.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It is.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		And a lot of us, again, we're inspired by Apollo, but as you pointed out, there's been this major cutback.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		A step backwards, kind of, as I look at it.
		Yet in a society that's more dependent upon science with each passing year, when you get right down to it, with all the new technology and everything that is coming out, and people who don't really understand how science operates.
		And so I think it's all been tied up in the fact that we just, there's very little work for a person that goes through college and wants to contribute to our knowledge about the universe.
		And it's not just astronomy, it's a lot of science.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, here, let me tell you my situation.
		I've been in electronics microwave all my life.
		And when I began with electronics, those were the days when you sat down and you built your own gear and you went out and you bought parts and you designed something or you took somebody's circuit and put it together.
		Those days are long gone.
		And I'm long lost in terms of present-day state-of-the-art electronics, and most people are.
		In other words, we're down to black box technology.
		If something goes wrong, you either throw it away or pull a module, if it's worth enough, and replace a module.
		But you don't understand how you fixed it.
		And that seems to have been what's happened to science.
		There's very little room anymore for the layman.
		It's very, very specialized.
		Is that occurring across the spectrum?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Somewhat.
		I mean, I can only offer a perspective on astronomy, I guess.
		Astronomy has actually one place where the amateur, as it were, can make contributions.
		I mean, we do have CCDs available these days, and there are actually quite a few amateur astronomers who are making quite a few good contributions and discoveries.
		I can't really speak for some of the other sciences.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you would encourage somebody to become an amateur astronomer, but not necessarily to pursue a full career in science?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I would love to be able to do that, but with the employment prospects currently being what they are, no, I cannot.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		God, that's sad.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So that's kind of why I went and formed this organization.
		I wanted to have a career in science.
		And by golly, I'm going to have one one way or another.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, so in a lot of ways, you've got a lot to thank this comet for.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, hold on.
		And I promise we'll lay into the phones when we get back.
		So if you have a question for Dr. Alan Hale, co-discoverer of this incredible comet, coursing through the cold space above us, come now.
		Trooper, I know it's an hour later there, so it's going to be pretty late.
		Are you normally a night?
		I would guess you're a night person.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, a spacey guys have to be, I think.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		That's the time that you've got to be out working.
		So what do you generally, when you have the time, are you generally up into the middle of the night?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Usually, I just usually work better that way anyway.
		But of course, I'm up in the day a lot, too.
		That's when I interact with the rest of society.
		Mm-hmm.
		I spend a lot of time in front of the computers, huh?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very much like my life, actually.
		All right, East of the Rockies, I promised.
		To the phones, you're on the air with Dr. Alan Hale.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
unidentified		This is Mark from Counsville, Illinois on Tech Com.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello, Mark.
unidentified		Hello, Art.
		I just came in from the outdoor, setting my binoculars up, so excuse my shaking.
		It's very cold outside.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it is, yes.
unidentified		I'll let my binoculars adjust.
		Mr. Hale, I have a few quick comments, or in fact, one comment and several quick questions, if I may.
		With no disrespect to your discovery, Mr. Hale, I would like to suggest to you that this comet has already been named from its possible appearance in the middle of the second millennium B.C. Well, with no disrespect intended, I'm sure he is Dr. Hale.
		Dr. Hale, yes.
		And there were many worldwide accounts of a great comet that fits the description and orbit of Hale Bob.
		I would advise everybody to or challenge everybody to do their homework.
		All you got to do is go to Pete Dalton.
		And another question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let him respond to that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're saying that it's no new deal.
unidentified		Well, it's been out there since 1950.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		1950.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		All right, Doctor?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Would you care to cite the source of This.
unidentified		Well, Emmanuel Velikovsky, for one.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I have a tendency to discount the works of Belikovsky.
		He had a lot of ideas which have since been shown to have been unverified.
		The idea that, for example, I think that Jupiter emits comets.
unidentified		Well, yes, I agree with that.
		But his accounts from the middle of the second millennium are not myths.
		They're actually oral traditions and rock art and whatnot of a worldwide catastrophe.
		And descriptions of horse hair, the raging bull, which this comet has got the two horns.
		And there's descriptions of it rising from the east and growing bright and heading north.
		But I would suggest everybody to look into it.
		My other question is, could you explain why NASA has cut off pictures from Hubble since October of 95?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, he just explained that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Did you not, Doctor?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		In fact, there's Hubble images from as recently as October 1996.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about the work of Sitchin, Zachariah Sitchin?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Any comments?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I be truthful.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I have not read it, but I have read critiques of some of his work, and I have a tendency to disbelieve that type of thing.
unidentified		I don't really necessarily see the evidence there.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Again, I've not necessarily read the work, but again, I've read critiques of it.
		Maybe I shouldn't overblow that too much.
		As far as a previous return of Halebop, yes, we do know that it was around once before.
		Unless there's a specific amount of positional information which can identify an object as this comet, there are lots of comets.
		Comets with two tails happens all the time.
		Almost every comet that comes close to the sun develops two tails, so that is really nothing unusual.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And we don't have the name of the guy who might have seen it the last time it was around.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		And the tradition of naming comets for the discoverers goes back two centuries, not millennia.
		The orbit we have tells us that Halebop was around 4,200 years ago.
		My understanding is that there has been one record of a comet from the year, I believe, 2192 B.C., but that there's not enough information, at least at this point, to tell us whether or not that's a record of Halebop or whether it's a record of one of the other great comets that certainly must have been around at that time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Doctor, I would be remiss if I did not ask you the following question, and that is, you spend a lot of time looking at the sky.
		A lot of people don't.
		They look straight ahead.
		They drive.
		They don't look at the sky.
		So they don't see things.
		But your guy has looked at the sky for a long time.
		There has been a UFO flap going on in this country since Roswell or before.
		And with all the time that you have looked at the sky, have you ever seen anything that you just flat couldn't explain?
unidentified		No.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I've seen a lot of very interesting phenomena.
		Just a couple of mornings ago, I was actually looking at Halebov, which was in the northeast, and over in the northwest, there was this brilliant spear of light coming up from the horizon, disappearing into the sky, and leaving a large trail of material behind it, which got all twisted and everything.
		It was a rocket launch from White Sands Missile Range, which is not too far from me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, we see something just like that from Vandenberg.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		And I've seen things from Vandenberg when I lived out in California.
		But I've seen that.
		I've seen brilliant fireballs, which leave trails which then get distorted by atmospheric winds.
		I've seen lithium and barium ionization experiments conducted in the atmosphere, re-entering satellites, auroras.
		We had an aurora here a few years ago.
		It was like the whole northern part of the sky is on fire.
		And I realized the listeners that live in the more northern latitudes go Aurora, big deal.
unidentified		Yeah, I know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They know all about it.
		I lived in Anchorage.
		I saw you.
		It is a big deal, actually.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It's beautiful.
		Here in New Mexico, we get them once every few years.
		And it was very impressive.
		We had people calling in UFOs when they saw this aurora.
		I've seen a lot of these very fascinating natural and man-made phenomena, but I've never seen anything that I couldn't explain.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You can explain.
		All right.
		Now a pretty sensitive question.
		You're a very mainstream kind of guy.
		Now you've discovered a comet that goes by your name forevermore.
		Very mainstream.
		If you saw something, honest answer called for here, that you absolutely couldn't explain, would you report it?
		Would you think real hard before you reported it from a career point of view?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I would certainly report it if there was something that I could not explain.
		I mean, I have what I'd like to think is a fair amount of knowledge about the universe around me, but I certainly don't know everything.
		And science as a whole does not know everything, doesn't even come close to knowing everything.
		There's certainly a lot of things that we don't understand.
		So I would certainly report it to my fellow astronomers and let them know, hey, I saw something.
		What do you think of this?
		And it would depend on whether it was a one-time event.
		If it was just a one-time event that never was repeated, I would kind of have a tendency to distrust my own senses.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There you are.
		That's, I guess, what I meant.
		And even though you thought you saw it, or even if you were sure you saw it, if it wasn't repeatable and demonstratable, it would be career-threatening, would it not, to report it?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I don't think it would be career-threatening.
		I mean, it's just the way I approach things is I know that our senses can sometimes deceive us.
		There have been times when I have been almost sleepy and I've almost felt detached from my own body, and yet it's just a state of, you know, I have like three-fourths of sleep, and my consciousness is starting to slip away from me a little bit.
		And we can be deceived by our own senses.
		We can be deceived by our own preconceived notions from time to time.
		I guess it would depend upon the situation.
		I mean, if I actually had photographs of the thing and some sort of records which I could show to someone else, I would certainly feel no hesitation at all about calling up some of my astronomer colleagues.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's good.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		What do you think about this?
		I mean, I saw this.
		I'm not quite sure what to make of it.
		What do you think?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		All right.
		Fair answer.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Alan Hale.
		Where are you, please?
		I'm in Sacramento.
		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Okay.
unidentified		I appreciate that, Dr. Hale.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I wanted to double check with you.
unidentified		That was the Southwest Institute for Scientific Research.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		For space research.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		For space research.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there a web page involved?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		We are just putting one together.
		I actually have a colleague of mine in Memphis who has put up a very temporary one.
		It's very much under construction right now.
unidentified		Okay.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		But I would certainly give you the URL for that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes, by all means.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Go right ahead.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		That's http://just like all web addresses are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		www.spaceportmemphus all together.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		No breaks or anything.com.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Spaceport Memphis?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, as a colleague of mine, it found a host in Memphis.
		We'll be moving that to New Mexico presumably at some point in time, the not too distant future.
		But meanwhile, you find a host when you can.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you taking now regular photographs of Hailbob?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		The only thing I'm doing to take photographs of Hailbop is I'm sticking a 35 millimeter camera on a tripod and opening up the shutter.
unidentified		Really?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		30 or 40 seconds.
		Really?
		And you can get some gorgeous pictures of that way if you have a bright enough colour.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Uh-huh.
		Instead of, and see, I went out and bought this camera attachment for my mead, and I've been so disappointed in what I saw in the mead that, oh, that's a very, very good idea.
		So you say regular 35, what speed film?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Pretty fast.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I've been using 400 or 1,000.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		400 or 1,000.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And how long an exposure?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		30 or 40 seconds.
		You start getting much longer than that.
		You start to get trailing.
		And you don't want to do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, that's a really good tip.
		All right.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		If I may, in my book, I've got some examples of some comet photographs I've taken that way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		And in fact, I have a lovely picture of Kama Yakutake that I managed to take the night it came by the North Pole a year ago.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		But I was able to get away with a five-minute exposure without trailing, but that's kind of unusual.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Depends, I guess, on the state of the atmosphere.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It depends really on how far north it is.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Hailbob is far enough north, we might be able to start getting away with maybe full-minute exposures without getting trailing, but with the setup I just described.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, I'm out about 65 miles east of Las Vegas, a little town called Brump, Nevada, where we have very, very clear skies.
		Frankly, more so to the west than the east.
		Toward the east, we've got a bit of a glow from the city of Las Vegas, even that far away.
		But the skies out here are remarkable, and when it comes up in the west, I'm going to try exactly what you just suggested.
		Okay, first time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Alan Hale.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Hello, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I'm calling from Prince Eric BC, Canada.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		And we're getting a really nice view of this comet up here.
unidentified		It's about an inch long in the sky to the naked eye.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would the view that far north, Doctor, be any different?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It would be higher in the sky.
		And from that latitude, I believe it may be circumpolar.
		Now, it may not set.
		It may stay above the horizon all night.
		My caller might be able to tell me that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can you see it all night long?
unidentified		No, it comes up about 3.30, and then it's, well, it's gone about 6.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Within a week or so, you will be able to see it all night long.
unidentified		Right, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It'd be far in the north along the northern horizon, but you will be able to see it.
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, if we have the time, we would attract some calls from Fairbanks.
		That's way up north.
		I presume they would be able to see it all the night long.
		All right, west of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Alan Hale.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Yeah, good morning, Art Jack from the Oregon coast.
		I'm in Foggsville, unfortunately.
		And good evening, or good morning, I guess, is Dr. Hale.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		Yeah, are you related in any way to Hale's observatory?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
unidentified		Okay.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		That's a good question.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I've never really investigated that.
unidentified		Okay, well, the one thing I did want to ask you, though, is only had one question for you.
		My mother, she's long dead now, but when she was a little girl, I guess it was, back in, I don't know somewhere between 1908 and 1915, she remembers seeing Halley's comet.
		I guess I'm about to write on the dates because she was hearsay for me.
		And she said it was phenomenal back then.
		Would you agree with that?
		Or would you say that it's anything like the Halebop comet?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's a fair question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A comparison between Halley's then and Halebob now.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		If you were to look at the two comets under identical circumstances, Halebop is far and away larger and brighter of the two.
		But, of course, we have different circumstances.
		Where is the comet in relationship to the sun and the earth when it's closest and all that?
		It is possible that your mother might have been referring to another brilliant comet that appeared in 1910 called the Daylight Comet of 1910.
		It was visible during the day for a while.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		On the other hand, Halley was very well placed in 1910 and had a...
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		And we put on a very good show for at least a brief period of time around that time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So a comet could be bright enough to be visible during the day.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		In fact, I have seen Hale Bomp telescopically after sunrise.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, I began to wonder about that the other morning myself.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It was so bright that you would think, I mean, it's not as bright as Venus, but it's getting there.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It's bright enough to see, at least telescopically, after sunrise.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I don't know if it's going to get bright enough to see the naked eye during daylight, but there have been occasional comets that have gotten that bright, although it's usually been for a brief period of time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Alan Hill.
		Hi.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It's a very pleasure to be on the air.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you, sir?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I am in Leavenworth, Kansas.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead.
		Go ahead.
		Okay, what I'm doing is getting rid of my radio.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, that's good.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		You've got to turn it completely off, correct?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Go ahead.
		So, Mr. Hill, Yes.
		Isn't that a great discovery that you discovered out there?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's a very good question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it is.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		It is.
		Well, I certainly consider it great from my own personal perspective.
		On the great grand scheme of things, perhaps not, but it's certainly one that's getting a lot of attention right now, and I am very glad of that.
		Well, I was able to observe it yesterday morning just before sunrise.
unidentified		It was in the eastern, southern part of the sky.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Southern?
		It should really be more than the north.
		Well, from where I was at, where I looked at it, it was just above the horizon.
		Okay.
		Is that the correct place to look?
		By sunrise, it's actually quite a ways above the horizon.
		Nope.
		I'm just trying to say that I saw, and I know that that was Hellbop.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I'm pretty sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know that it is, I'm pretty sure.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Did it have a long tail with it?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, good chance it was then.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There's nothing else, Doctor, is there, in our sky right now with a long tail?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Nothing with a long tail.
		There's a couple of the planets that are fairly bright.
		Jupiter's kind of low in the southeast right now during dawn, and it's bright, and Mars is over in the west at that time.
		But Inhale Bob is in the northeast.
		Of course, the two planets are just points of light.
		At least to the eye, they are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		May I ask about?
		We're so low on time now, but I want to ask about this.
		Venus, of course, is very bright.
		Morning sky, Venus, or evening.
		If you look at it and just stare at Venus with your eyes, there is an optical thing that begins to occur.
		And Venus looks very much like it's moving up and down, sideways, and all over the place.
		And it's some sort of optical conclusion, I guess.
		What is it that does that?
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Good question.
		I haven't encountered that.
		It's probably just your eye, whether you know it or not, the eyelid is constantly blinking at a very fast rate.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, that's true.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		And that's probably what you're seeing.
		The eye is not an analog sampler.
		Your eye is a digital sampler.
		It samples things at a very phenomenal rate.
unidentified		So in other words, that...
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Maybe just your eyes getting tired of staring at this object the whole time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So that may account for the many reports of that being a UFO.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, in fact, Venus is probably the most commonly reported UFO of any object.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You did acknowledge earlier in the program that there is a great likelihood that life is fairly common out there.
		Are you surprised that we have not yet encountered some serious evidence of that life in the form of radio signals?
		Radio signals are the first thing that really comes to mind.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		Not really.
		Depending on who you talk to, the chances of a species, a life evolving some sort of sentience like we have here on Earth, some people seem to think that's likely, some people think it's not.
		And again, we're dealing with a sample of one, so it's really hard to get any kind of feel for how likely it would be.
		To me, though, I think the biggest detractor would be that consider that the entire lifetime of the Earth, 4.5 billion years, and consider how long of that span there has been a species that's been capable of sending out radio signals.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not very long.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		In 20 or 30 years out of a span of 4.5 billion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You bet.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		And for us to receive that, some other species would have to be in that kind of a span right at the exact same time we are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And of course, we may well pass the need for that kind of communication, radiation, within another 100 years or so to be able to.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		And there's no way to know that.
		And how typical are we?
		We don't know that either.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Great.
		Doctor, it has been a pleasure.
		And I would like to have you back again and again as the comet does its thing over the next couple of months.
		So if you would agree to that, we'd love to have you back.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		We can probably work something like that.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		I don't see why not.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Dr. Hale, thank you.
alan hale ▲ ● ▼		You're welcome.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And good night.
		From the high desert, folks, a very good location to view the comet.
		I want to thank Dr. Alan Hale for being here, and he will be back.

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