I remember Hale-Bopp in the 90's. That was an awesome sight!

I liked Hale-Bopp. I wasn't expecting much after the disappointment of Kohoutek when I was a little kid, but then one evening I looked up and there it was, and it was pretty cool. Hale-Bopp was subtle; you could miss it if you weren't looking in the right place. ISON may be so spectacular that it wold be impossible to miss.

Hale-Bopp was subtle? Maybe that's location dependent, because it certainly wasn't subtle here.

Perhaps my favorite comet up to this point was Shoemaker-Levy[1]. In the nascent internet days, I was working for a company that took interesting things online (such as shareware[2]) and packaged them onto CDs for people who didn't have pipes as fat as our amazing 56k dedicated line. I built a CD of images of Shoemaker-Levy slamming into Jupiter. I was in awe the entire time[3]. I can't even imagine the colossal energies those impacts created.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy_9

2. Another thing I convinced the owners to do was put together a Linux CD. That laid the foundations for what would eventually become Turbolinux[3].

3. And, even though the interface was in Visual Basic, I was still happy with the output.

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbolinux

More likely: Time continues emulating Newsweek in 2013.