Re: comet ISCON
Aaah, Sky just dated himself! The term "ASA" was officially changed to "ISO" sometime back in the 80's!
As for the pamphlet I had it was written back in a time when black and white film was available as well as infra red. The use of various filters was recommended. It also recommended what Skychaser just said and that is to take lots of pictures of varying exposures. I never did get Comet Kohoutek on film but I do have some nice photos of Comet Halley.
lol Yeah, the "best if used by" date went by a long time ago on me.
I used to burn through a lot of film (and money) back in the day getting a decent shot. That all changed with digital. Now I can shoot a hundred photos a night and not spend a cent.
I remember waiting for Halleys comet to return back in 89 and what a disappointment is was. Just a small little smudge in the sunset. The Earth was on the wrong side of its orbit for a good view and the northen hemisphere was tilted the wrong way.
Hale/Bopp in 1997 was awesome. We watched it coming in bound in telescopes for over a year before it became visible to the eye. You could see a jet of gas coming out of it and it rotated, and the jet spiraled around 3 times as it expanded out and became the tail. A friend and I used to set up our telescopes in grocery store parking lots and let who ever came along have a look. I must have shown it to at least a 1000 people.
The best comet was Yakataki the year before Hale/Bopp. It was a tiny comet compared to Hale/Bop but it did a perfect broad side fly by of Earth. The tail covered almost half the sky! I will never forget that one.
Here's a photo I took of comet Ikeya-Zhang passing above the Andromeda galaxy on April 4th, 2002. The photo was taken with a Minolta X-700 camera and 200 mm zoom lens on 400 speed film . This was a 5 minute guided exposure taken on a camera tracking platform I built. My guess is that the comets currently out there will look a lot like Ikeya-Zhang did.