The club had its new 25" Obsession telescope on hand for everyone to enjoy. The lines were long but well worth the wait. This telescope will soon be housed permanently at the park as part of the Astronomical Observatory and Natural Science Center Complex.

There were lots of telescopes on hand, including "Big Eyes" a giant pair of binoculars, all of which were trained on Hale Bopp, our visitor from the outer solar system. Hope you got a good look at it as you won't have another chance for at least 2400 years!

Raffle tickets were sold to help raise money for the construction of this project. The raffle will be held on Astronomy Day at the Boise Towne Square Mall at 4 P.M. You don't need to be present to win. Stay tuned for the winners.

Spencer Stowe

of Baked Earth put on a spectacular concert that could be heard thruout the park. He was promoting his New Age CD that has been dedicated to the park and to the Boise Astronomical Society for the building of the new observatorys. Spencer is donating a generous percentage of his sales to the project. If you did not get a chance to get your copy of this great CD just click on the order button and start enjoying these star gazing tunes!

On July 23, 1995 two independent observers, Dr. Alan Hale of Cloudcroft, New Mexico, and amateur Thomas Bopp, , observing 90 miles southwest of Phoenix, both reported a fuzzy object in the constellation Sagittarius which did not appear on published charts.

At the time of the discovery, it was well beyond the orbit of Jupiter, almost 700 million miles from the sun. Since most comets are small dirty snowball type objects on the order of a mile or less in diameter, the brightness of this comet at discovery greatly excited the astronomical community.

Over the coming months, as it moved closer to the sun, it's orbit was computed to bring it closest to the sun on March 22, bringing it to within 110 million miles to Earth.