Harold A. Weaver

(Last Updated: 1 November 2001)

First off, my friends call me Hal. I am a Research Scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Most of my scientific work is related to comets and their relevance to the origin of the solar system, but I am also interested in planets and satellites, the interstellar medium, and the formation and evolution of planetary systems.

Here is a brief biographical sketch , that provides some background on my research career.

Here is a PDF version of my vitae . Or, if you prefer, you can grab this postscript version .

Here is the PDF version of my publications . Again, you might instead want to download the postscript version .

Other information that might be of interest:

o Read about the breakup of Comet C/1999 S4 (LINEAR).

o You can dowload a reprint of the paper An Infrared Investigation of Volatiles in Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner (PDF format, 234 KB), which was recently published in Icarus (v. 142, pp. 482-497, 1999). Unfortunately, Academic Press made an error in typesetting the abstract and published an erratum (v. 144, p. 203, 2000), which I'll post as soon as AP's website comes back online.

o A reprint of the invited review paper by Weaver and Lamy, Estimating the Size of Hale-Bopp's Nucleus , which was presented at the First International Hale-Bopp Conference, can be found here. The paper was published in a special issue of Earth, Moon, Planets, in late-1999 (v. 79, pp. 17-33).

o A reprint of our paper on IRTF results from comet Hale-Bopp, Infrared Spectroscopy of Comet Hale-Bopp , which was presented at the First International Hale-Bopp Conference, can be found here. This is a postscript file and is 477KB long. The paper was published in a special issue of Earth, Moon, Planets, in late-1999 (v. 78, pp. 71-80).

o We did a quick search for any possible companions to comet Hale-Bopp, using all of the post-perihelion HST images. The results are described in this Baby Bopp memo .

o A description of the August 1997 HST observations of Comet Hale-Bopp can be found here.

o A mosaic containing all HST Comets observed since the December 1993 servicing mission can be found here.

o A preprint of an HST Comet Review Paper that I wrote for the ``Science with the GHRS'' symposium held at the Goddard Space Flight Center in September 1996 can be found here. This is a postscript file and is 437KB long. This paper should be published in a PASP Conference Proceedings soon (i.e., fall of 1997).

o A reprint of an SL9 Review Paper that I wrote for IAU Symposium No. 178, "Molecules in Astrophysics: Probes and Processes", can be found here. This is a postscript file and is 1.355MB long. The meeting was held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in June 1996 and the proceedings were published this summer by Kluwer Academic Publishers. Beware that you may have problems displaying and printing figures 2, 3, and 7 in the above-mentioned postscript file. These figures were created by Kevin Zahnle on a Macintosh, and I've always had trouble with them on my UNIX system. If you want hardcopy of my paper, I have a limited number of reprints that I can send you upon request.

o Go to my original Comet Hale-Bopp site to get a description of the 1995 Hubble Space Telescope observations of this now famous comet.

o Since we also took some HST images of Hale-Bopp between April 1996 and October 1996, I created a new figure which shows how Hale-Bopp transformed from a ``sprinkler'' into a ``porcupine''.

o A paper describing the results from our HST and IUE programs on Hale-Bopp appears in the 28 March 1997 issue of Science magazine. Figure 1 of that paper is a mosaic showing HST images of the comet taken during each of the eight observing periods. I've also included the version of the September 1995 HST image that appeared in Nature magazine last year, a higher resolution version of the September 1996 HST image, and a processed version of the latter that enhances the jet structures. You can download the full text version of the Science paper in PDF format , but the file size is 467KB.

o As part of my public outreach activities, I designed a WWW page for NOVA that was put online during the re-broadcast of a NOVA program called ``The Doomsday Asteroid'', which discussed the possibility of an asteroid or comet hitting the Earth. This site contains a lot of general information on comets and is meant to be accessible to the non-scientific public.

o For the apparition of Comet Hyakutake during the spring of 1996, I put together a Hyakutake WWW page for my son's elementary school. This site contains some general information on comets that I hope can be understood by school children and their parents.

o For the apparition of Comet Hale-Bopp in 1997, I put together a simple Hale-Bopp WWW page for my son's elementary school.

Go to the top of this webpage

Comments on this WWW page can be sent to Hal Weaver via e-mail at weaver@pha.jhu.edu .