Speaking as an amateur sky watcher, how enormously cool will it be if this thing passes close enough to shower the atmosphere with a massive amount of dust-size particles so that the resulting “meteor shower” is unlike any in recorded history?
My luck it’ll occur on the opposite side of the planet. Here’s hoping for a once-in-a-lifetime (no, not last-in-a-lifetime) show.
Just go out before dawn the day we pass through its tail. You should be able to see the comet dust coming down. I did this for comet Lee in 1999 and it was quite impressive. It was an expened iron comet, without a corona and was nearly invisible to the naked eye. The comet’s dust was road flare red, very fast and nearly verticle near before dawn. The dust meteorites were visible in the daylight too. Imo if this comet was going to come as close as Lee it would have been scrubbed from the internet just as Lee was for the most part.