EASILY visible even from urban areas, Comet Hyakutake passed just 15 million kilometres from the Earth on Monday morning. Observers saw an icy-blue blob with a faint gas tail stretching 30° or more in the darkest skies, making it the most spectacular comet for twenty years.
Most bright comets do not come so close. Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics says Hyakutake is "intrinsically the brightest comet to come this close to Earth since 1556". The comet will stay bright as its first approach to the Sun in nine thousand years offsets its retreat from the Earth. Moonlight is starting to spoil the cometary show, but a total lunar eclipse at about midnight London time on 3 April will give comet-watchers a chance of a good view. Astronomers expect the comet to reach its brightest in late April when it will appear low in the evening sky after sunset. After passing 34 million kilometres from the Sun on 1 May it will be visible before dawn in the southern hemisphere.
But even after the show is over, astronomers will still have Comet Hale-Bopp to look forward to next year, which Marsden predicts will be "the comet of the century".
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