Discovered on July 23 1995.
To this day, it is the only comet I have seen with my naked eye. Even the haze and light pollution of coastal LA county didn’t obscure it.
For me it is only Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake. But Hyakutake I had to try to see, and Hale-Bopp was impossible to not see.
We lived in a fairly low-rise section of Brooklyn, so we could sort of see it there. While it was visible I went to a conference in Saratoga Springs, where I could see it very well. As a kid I remember seeing that Haley’s Comet would be visible in 1985, and was really pissed when I didn’t see jack shit.
You didn’t have to try very hard to see Hyakutake, but yeah, it wasn’t “HEY LOOK AT ME”, like Hale-Bopp was.
Now imagine a comet that was as large as Hale-Bopp, and also as close as Hyakutake. Now that would be a sight to see.
You should have tried again in 1986.
A photo I took (on film!):
Didn’t see it then either. It was supposed to be visible late 1985 until early 1986, and I didn’t know anyone who saw it.
Not my photo but what I got to see over three nights spread across the S Atlantic …the tail went on forever.
Dumb luck …someone walked into the apartment and said…“Seen the comet”??
We were right on the ocean in Hermanus and it was mesmerizing night after night at sunset and after for a bit.
I had one green earth grazer meteor that rivaled the spectacle but that lasted only a minute…this you just looked and loved. No photo captures how far that filmy tail extended. 
That looks like Comet West to me.
No idea what Comet West is but that’s McNaught - not Hale Bopp…thought the date was off.
This is what we saw
I mean, technically, I saw it. Barely. Through binoculars. It might have been naked-eye visible if I’d been in a good dark-sky location, instead of the outskirts of Cleveland.
My mom’s still disappointed, because she heard so much about how it looked in 1910. But I suspect that a lot of that was exaggerated.
The skies were vastly darker in 1910, and it passed al lot closer to the Earth, so it was probably pretty good.
I lived out in the country and still couldn’t see it. I’m sure there were other times it was less visible, but I had such high hopes that were dashed.
After Kohoutek fizzled in 1973, the news media was very circumspect about mentioning anything about West 3 years later, so it got virtually no coverage despite putting Kohoutek to utter shame. Heck I was a pretty astronomically astute kid at the time, and I only found out about it several years later, and boy was I pissed.
I talked my wife into a trip to Hawaii, which unbeknownst to her was also where Halley’s comet was nicely visible. BUT it required getting up at about 4:00 AM: “I’m on vacation!” she protested, but she got up anyway.