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Photo Gallery: Asteroids and Comets

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The Hale-Bopp comet shines against a stellar backdrop in the constellation Sagittarius in this Hubble Space Telescope image. Discovered in 1995 by amateur astronomers Alan Hale in New Mexico and Thomas Bopp in Arizona, the extremely bright comet became visible to the naked eye the following year. It gradually faded from view, but astronomers predict that Hale-Bopp will be viewable with large telescopes until around 2020. Photograph courtesy H. A. Weaver (Applied Research Corp.), P. D. Feldman (The Johns Hopkins University), and NASA