Halley’s Comet COW

To introduce special coverage of Halley's Comet in 1986, Presentation thought it would be a novel idea to zoom in on the COW globe and key the spinning world image onto a background of the night sky. Unfortunately, this exposed one of the disadvantages of a fixed animated image – not only does the screen resolution get worse the closer we zoom in on the globe (which, in theory at least, it wouldn't with a model) but we also see a flaw in the layer animation. Namely, on the right hand side of the COW, the golden continents do not fully reach the edge of the blue circle. Still, it was a trick the BBC obviously liked, for the COW would later be zoomed in on for other shows such as Neighbours.