Comet Hale-Bopp was the last "great" comet prior to Comet NEOWISE that we saw back in July. That was over 23 years ago! Of course, photography was still in the film age back then. This picture was taken with my then-shiny Pentax ME Super 35mm SLR film camera and 200mm telephoto lens.
When I was looking through a box of old photos I came across an envelope with these in it. I wondered if scanning the negatives would yield a superior image compared to the original prints? On the night of April 4 1997, I had taken three photos at 60 second exposures. I scanned in those negatives and using today's techniques of stacking and stretching, the result was the image above. I'm happy to say that the newly processed image has much more detail in it than the original print. I think that the result is reasonably comparable to astronomy photos taken today. I'm glad I stuffed those photos in that box so many years ago!