Comet Hale-Bopp may be on its way out of the solar system, but it left no shortage of images taken by astronomers around the world. NASA's "Near-Live Comet Watching System" features images taken by astronomers around the world, including some just a few minutes old. The Comet Hale-Bopp Home Page at JPL features the most extensive catalog of Hale-Bopp images on the Web, with over 3,100 images at last report. The central source of information on the comet is at www.halebopp.com, which includes commentary from the comet co-discoverers, recent news, and evidence to debunk the conspiracy theorists. Don't forget SpaceViews' own Hale-Bopp site, which has the largest collection of links to other sites, now numbering over 300.

Near-Live Comet Watching System

http://comet.hq.nasa.gov/

Comet Hale-Bopp Home Page at JPL

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/comet/

http://galileo.ivv.nasa.gov/comet/

www.halebopp.com

http://www.halebopp.com/

SpaceViews Hale-Bopp Site

http://www.seds.org/spaceviews/halebopp/

There is no shortage of shuttle sites on the Web, thanks in large part to NASA efforts in the last couple years. However, there's no site quite like the "STS-86: Countdown to Mir" because this site was created and is maintained by the STS-86 crew themselves. There's a great deal of information about the mission on the site, including a lot of extra details and tidbits that would never appear on a NASA site. Maybe this crew can start a trend...

http://www.phoenix.net/~shuttle/

You can easily turn to just about any planetarium program to see where the planets are in the night sky, but "Solar System Live" is a Web site that gives you the opportunity to look down on the solar system and see the positions of the planets in their orbits around the Sun. You can see the planets in their positions as of the present time, or check out the positions at other times in the past and future (for example, the so-called "alignment" of the planets on May 5, 2000; see how far off some of the outer planets are!).