"This is a nice comet!" said Bob Post after viewing it on March
28. "I am twenty miles north of Center City Philadelphia, and 3 miles from Warminster
to the west. So my skies are not dark. But this comet is a delight in
20x60 binoculars, and even with some thin clouds and a full Moon to my back,
I could see nearly two degrees of tail."
And this, from Bob Benward of the Astronomical Society of Long Island: "Even
from the light-polluted skies of Huntington, New York it is definitely a naked
eye object."
Similar raves were coming in from other places around the globe.
On the evening of March 25, Fabio Zucconi of Lodi, Italy stated that although
the sky wasn’t very good and the interfering moonlight was strong, "the
comet was very bright."
William David Halbert reports that he saw the comet on March 29 from Ulm, Germany.
"Just got back from outside with this beautiful dirty snowball," Halbert
said. "I used a pair of 14x70 binoculars and an Astroscan telescope and both
views were wonderful. Though the binocs I could trace the tail out to 2.5 to
3 degrees. This is one lovely comet. As it got darker the tail just got easier
and easier. I had quite a few 'visitors' who got out some 'oohs' and 'aahs'
to pass around. I had the feeling that the nucleus was blue."
To the chagrin of residents in one half of the world, comet Ikeya-Zhang is
too far north to be visible from the Southern Hemisphere. Yet another comet,
LINEAR (C/2000 WM1), which briefly and unexpectedly flared to easy naked-eye
brightness at the end of January, was only visible to viewers in the Southern
Hemisphere.
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