C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp)
OVERVIEW
] COMETC/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp) is a comet. It orbits the Sun at a mean distance of 177.4 . Its effective radius is 30 . It was discovered in 1995.
The Great Comet of 1997, visible to the naked eye for a record eighteen months and bright enough to be seen from inside cities.
- WHAT IT IS
- Comet
- HOW FAR
- 177.4
- HOW BIG
- 30
- ONE ORBIT TAKES
- 2360
Its average distance from the Sun, not from Earth.
The radius of a ball that would look the same size — the body itself is not round.
One trip round the Sun.
IMAGES
] 1 FRAMES- E. Kolmhofer, H. Raab; Johannes-Kepler-Observatory, Linz, Austria (https://sternwarte.at)
CC BY-SA 3.0
OBSERVING
] FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp) for yourself. Everything in this part of the page is worked out for a real horizon, a real night and the equipment you say you have.
CATALOG DATA
] 12 FIELDSThe raw catalogue values, as the source published them, with the error bars where one was published — sorted by what each set of figures is about rather than by the order they happened to be stored in.
HOW BRIGHT IT IS
What the light adds up to, measured through one filter at a time. A magnitude is a brightness on a backwards scale — the smaller the number, the brighter the object.
- Albedo
THE ORBIT
The shape of the path, where the object sits on it, and the instant those figures were true of. An orbit is a fit to observations and drifts away from the real one either side of its epoch.
- Orbital period
- 2363 ±61
- Eccentricity
- Inclination
- 89.29
- Longitude of ascending node
- 282.73
- Argument of perihelion
- 130.41
- Mean anomaly
- 3.88
- Element epoch
- 2459837.5000
- Perihelion passage
- 2450537.1300
- Minimum distance from Earth's orbit
- 0.0878
- Orbit class
- COM
WHEN IT WAS FOUND
Who first saw it, from where, and by what method.
- First observed
- 1993-04-27
ALSO KNOWN AS
] 3 DESIGNATIONS- Comet 1995 O1
- Comet C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp)
- Common name Hale-Bopp
LOOK IT UP ELSEWHERE
] 1 SERVICEEach link carries the identifier printed beside it. Nothing on this page is a measurement of our own, so a number that disagrees with one of these is worth reporting — and a service that has never catalogued this object under this name will say so plainly.
- JPL Small-Body DatabaseC/1995 O1
The orbit these elements were taken from, with its uncertainty, its close approaches and every observation behind the fit.
CITE THIS PAGE
] DR1This page is live and its numbers move when an upstream refreshes, so the citation names the release the rows belong to rather than the day you read them. The release itself is frozen, republished as a bundle, and is what a data-availability statement should point at.
SpaceCatalog. C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp) [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/c-1995-o1-hale-bopp
@misc{spacecatalog_c-1995-o1-hale-bopp,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp)}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/c-1995-o1-hale-bopp},
note = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from JPL Small-Body Database.}
}The values above were taken from JPL Small-Body Database — Public domain (NASA/JPL). Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue.
RECENT ACTIVITY
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arXiv · UPDATED DAILY