What great time that was! We had hundreds of people at our club’s observatory.
Hale-Bopp and Hyakutaki made for two great years of astronomy!
My club pulled in large numbers of folks for those two, but, our best event was Halley’s Comet. My club is in Savannah, and, we had our event at Ft. Pulaski. We expected maybe a hundred to show. We had 4,000+ show up!
The funnest part was when the local TV station decided to do a live feed from the event and turned on their area lights so the talking head could be seen. He was almost beaten live on local TV.
I have two favorite memories of Hale-Bopp. One was that my Dad was actually interested in looking at it, and, we would wonder down his street looking for a bit of sky with no trees so it could be seen.
The other was when I first started dating the woman who would become my wife. We went out to dinner at the beach and after, we would normally go for a walk on the beach. Instead, we took pictures of Hale-Bopp. When it started getting down into the city lights to the west, we went for a ride to the other side of town and took more pictures. And she still went out with me after that.
I decided she was a keeper!