Digging around in some of my old film shots I ran across this photo of Comet Hyakutake I took in 1996. It was a rare try at an astronomical image (something I want to do more of) and mediocre at best, but since I had never tried scanning the film negative of this shot, this became a technical exercise more than anything. My shot pales in comparison to the many beautiful images of Hyakutake taken by seasoned astrophotographers, but still it was a breathtaking, once-in-a-lifetime viewing event and I had a blast taking the shot. One hour photo prints being what they are (or aren’t), I wanted to see what I could do with this old negative on my present day Canon 8400f flatbed in 35mm film scanning mode. I was pleased to see the improvement I was able to make over the print. In Photoshop I ran a noise reduction filter, added a curves layer to fine tune the contrast and a hue/saturation layer to darken certain colors and reduce some of the atmospheric haze bringing out the tail a bit more. The 30 sec. exposure (using Fujicolor 1600 film) as you can see is a bit long and the stars are just beginning to elongate due to earth’s rotation, but all in all not a bad attempt and a fun memory.