A funny story about the making of this image: I had spent the night until about 2:00 a.m. photographing wide-field images and decided to take a short nap in my truck before the comet was scheduled to rise above the horizon around 4:00. It was cold that night in the Arizona desert and I knew I could really use the chance to get warm again. So when my alarm wakes me around 4:30, I'm all snug in my sleeping bag, it's warm and comfortable, and I'm having a real hard time convincing myself to go back out into the cold morning air. I sit up, and with droopy eyes I look out the right-side windows (facing southwest) and check the position of the Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way. It's really high and really bright, but nothing I haven't seen before. Then I slowly move my head and look out the left-side windows and I'm out of the truck so fast I'm pulling the sleeping bag and all the blankets with me because I still don't have my boots on. To this day, my first sight of the full glory of this comet is the most amazing astronomical experience I've had. I never imagined it could be so huge and bright and dominating. No wonder ancient cultures considered them omens. I'd seen it in the evening a few times before, but that was before it grew to it's brightest and largest. In the clear morning air, with dark-adapted eyes, it was startling. So, anyway, the above image was taken by a bootless, recently awakened person on the morning of March 10, 1997, using a Mamiya RB67 camera with a 90mm lens at f/4 on un-hypered Kodak 1000-speed medium format film (PMZ). The exposure lasted approximately 15 minutes. The whole package was mounted piggyback on a Celestron CG-11 telescope set up at Los Alamos Lake State Park, Arizona. The negative was scanned using a Linotype-Hell Saphir Ultra scanner and the image was prepared in Photoshop 4 on a PowerMac 8100/80.