The 90s were a great time to be an amateur astronomer in the U.S..
Shoemaker-Levy 9
Comet Hyakutake
Hale-Bopp
The annular eclipse of 94
The Perseid shower peak
And the new World Wide Web just added to the fun.
Man I hope ISON lives up to the hype. Things have been a bit dry in the Eastern U.S. for the past 14 years.
Hale-Bopp was a nice one. When I was a kid there was a naked-eye comet, huge in the eastern sky, around 2 am. I don’t think it lasted long, but I really didn’t feel like getting up at 2 am every day. This wasn’t Kahoutek, that turned out to require telescopic viewing.
I kept telling people that Hale-Bopp would be the only time in their lives they would see a comet like that. I was amazed to find that many of them just didn’t care or bother to look at it. Anyway, I hope I will be wrong later this year. Ison should be pretty awsome of what they say is true. Passing within a million and a half miles of the sun could vaporize most or all of it.