I got a nice view of Hale Bop from the Grand Canyon. The closest I came to experiencing the comet in the OP was buying the Pink Floyd bootleg "In Celebration Of The Comet - The Coming Of Kohoutek".
I can’t even remember if I saw Kohoutek, tried to see Halley’s but it was too overcast.
I saw Comet Kohoutek way back in January, 1974. (I had to use binoculars otherwise, I never would have seen it). Since I’m in the Boston area, looking for that in January was brutally cold. Needless to say, none of my friends wanted to look for it - in zero degree weather. :eek:
As far as Comet Halley, I believe (as others have said) that the 1986 appearance was one of the worst appearances ever. If you were hoping for a better appearance in 2062, I’ve been told it will be equally crappy. 
I’ve heard that the appearance after that (around 2138 ??) should be pretty spectacular.
D’oh! By then people will be living on Mars and won’t be half as impressed by it!
Yup, lived in Houston, TX at the time, in the El Lago subdivision, which was full of astronauts and NASA scientists and the like. A guy had a HUGe telescope trained on Kohoutek and all the neighborhood kids lined up to see it, including me.
The first of many crushing disappointments.
I did. I was in Taos, NM at the time. Somewhere I have pics, it was pretty spectacular.
Yes, I remember it very vividly. I had not heard or read about it, but one night, when I had to get up to go to the bathroom and did not bother to switch on the light, I saw this comet through the bathroom window and thought that I must be dreaming. I found it quite impressive. A few days later I read about it in the newspaper.
You must have been dreaming. Kahoutek never gave off enough light to shine through a window at night. or you may be remembering Hale-Bopp or Hayakutake.
If they saw the light with thier eyes, it was shining 
Something doesnt even need to be particularly bright to be seen through a window. As in like not at all.
I remember going out with my Dad, who was trying to photograph Kohoutek. Even the photos were meh. The best comet I, personally, have seen is Hale-Bopp.
I remember a couple of things from that timeframe that were supposed to be big deals: Kohoutek and Evel Knievel’s Snake River Canyon Jump. I stayed up late to see Kohoutek and was roundly disappointed. I went to see the canyon jump live on closed-circuit broadcast, and was also roundly disappointed.
And I agree with others here that Hale-Bopp was cool.
Oh well, my language was unclear. I meant it was never bright enough to really draw your eye to it, like a source from the outside that would be enough to provide any additional illumination to the room.
But re-reading the thread I replied to, the poster may not have meant that.
My younger daughter’s sixth grade teacher organized a field trip to see Halley’s with the parents providing transportation to a hill top with an open view of the eastern horizon. Four-thirty in the morning with a car load of teeny-boppers. Stood around for a half hour trying to focus on a vague smudge about a hand’s width above the horizon. Even with field glasses it didn’t look like much. Also just about as cold as it could be – the prairie before dawn in January is no day at the beach. Afterwards took the girls for a tavern fry-up breakfast. A dozen or so construction workers, truck drivers, dairy farmers (some of them working on an eye opener), six little girls and a bleary eyed father. Breakfast was the highlight of the day. The daughter, a thirty-some school administrator, still talks about it.
I feel bad, The only quasi-stellar phenomenon I’ve ever seen would be falling stars (meteors). And I only finally caught them during a shower last year or so. Before then, I was lamenting never seeing anything interesting in the sky.
Garrison Keillor did a song/rap about Hale-Bopp. Here are the words:
Here it is vocally, with the band: (starts at 2:42)
Except, naturally, in the far Southern Hemisphere, I read somewhere. They have all the luck.
Halley’s was certainly a big disappointment in 1986. I read somewhere that the previous visit, in 1910 had been spectacular, and my grandmother, who had been fourteen years old, at that time, said she remembered it. Since as far as I could tell she had no interest otherwise, in matters celestial, I thought it must have been a big deal indeed for her to have remembered it. We all know what happened, but at least I did get to see Hale Bopp. I doubt if I could have seen it from mid L.A., but we had spent the day in Paradise Cove, and the comet was overhead. Very impressive, with an easily discernible coma and tail.
I remember Johnny Carson making all sorts of jokes about Comet Kohoutek. If I saw it, it didn’t stick out in my mind. Same with Halley’s, which I was disappointed with.
The only comet that does stick in my mind is Hale-Bopp. We were on a trip to the US at the time, and I clearly remember seeing it one night in Glendale, California. I don’t recall seeing it here in Thailand at all.
I saw both, and My daughter got some very good pictures of both(at the time they were seen) It may be that your vantage point was not as good as ours but we were both amazed. We could see the tail way across the sky and the brightness of the comet itself. we could see it fine with out her telescope but the telescope made it even clearer.
I was nine years old and I remember all the hype about Kohoutek, but as I recall it was only barely visible briefly before dawn.
I recall that Halley’s was also barely visible in 1986, a smear of light in the evening sky.
I saw Hyakutake clearly, even in a small-ish city. Hale-Bopp was quite a show in 1997, even sprouting a second tail.
Saw it in the college observatory. No big deal, a disappointment. I remember better that Bloom County did a strip on Oliver’s let down that the comet was such a drag.