Comets continued:
Seeing Comet Bennett impressed me. But a careless reading of a chart in a library book left me believing (until I bothered to look it up when the Internet was young ... ish) that what I'd actually seen was Comet Ikeya-Seki, the brightest comet of the 1960s and perhaps the 20th Century.
Comet Ikeya-Seki was discovered "as a faint telescopic object" on September 18 1965, and it was soon found to have a steep orbit that would have it whipping around the Sun only 450 thousand km from the solar surface. (From the center of the Sun to its surface is 700 thousand km, so this is less than one solar radius from that hot surface!)
Its perihelion passage would be brief at an estimated speed of 500 km per second, and was calculated to happen on October 21 1965. I was too young at the time to be aware or care.
But as it swept past the sun, it became a spectacular object with a tail that stretched 110 million km, most of the Sun-Earth distance. It reached visual magnitude -10, making it "clearly visible in the daytime sky next to the solar disc". It also broke into at least three pieces on its closest approach to the Sun. Here are some pics of this amazing visitor.