Reply to both Kim and Patrick: Yes, Patrick is right, by rigidly defining a "great" comet as one easily visible in the daytime, then perhaps we may not live long enough to see one! To me, to be "great", a comet must be both large, as seen on the sky, and bright- an immense visual spectacle outshining just about everything else in the night sky. Hale-Bopp was reasonably bright, but even at it's best was perhaps 1/4 to 1/3 the apparent size of West and not quite bright enough to get it into the great category in my mind. Huykutake was incredibly long- and dim at closest approach, although just on weirdness and ghostly beauty I may be persuaded to call it "nearly great". Comet West was huge. The tail began rising a couple of hours before the nucleus, and cut a magnificent swath across a big chunk of the sky. And it was bright! The tail didn't dim quickly with distance from the nucleus, it stayed remarkably bright for most of it's length. I do believe it spoiled me. It got very little press, due to the Kohoutek fiasco a year or two before (fall of '74). The Media got burned once and didn't want to get burned again. It's good to be an amateur astronomer and not have to depend on mainstream media for news about things like comets! I suspect whomever wrote the Wikipedia entry (anyone can), never saw West (or Bennett for that matter). I'd call Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake "great" in the sense that they were "terrific" comets, 8 out of 10, maybe 8.5. West was a 9.5+. A good comparison is, say, if Ikeya-Zhang was Hale-Bopp, then Hale-Bopp would be West. Does this analogy help illustrate the difference? My 3 cents. --- Kim <kimharch@cut.net> wrote:
Incidentally, Wikipedia lists both Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake as "great" comets.
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