On March 24-25, a marine layer covered the south end of the San Francisco Bay Area most of the time; I only got a brief glimpse of the comet, not even enough for a magnitude estimate, from my office window in central Palo Alto -- all I had to do was turn off the lights and shut off the monitor on my workstation. But the 25-26 was clearer, and I took some friends -- all newcomers to astronomy --a out for a sampling of sites of various degrees of darkness.

At 0700 UT 26 March, from the parking lot at the Page Mill Road (Palo Alto) exit off US 280, with the nearly first-quarter moon high in the west, I estimated the integrated magnitude of the comet as -0.3, and saw about 40 degrees of tail. Even rank beginners could see 20 to 30 degrees of tail, this from sky of limiting magnitude about 4.5. My observations were naked-eye, though we had binoculars as well.

Next we drove northward, to a slightly darker "Vista Point" exit off 280 in the vicinity of San Mateo. There I set up my 90 mm Vixen refractor. We viewed the comet at 25 diameters -- color and the "jet" were visible, as many have described. After twenty minutes to half an hour of dark adaptation, several beginners could see the tail out to 40 degrees, and I was beginning to suspect it was longer. I also showed them the Moon, Mizar and Alcor, M13 and M104 in the refractor, figuring that the comet was enough of a fix to habituate, and wishing to indicate that further doses were available when they began to encounter withdrawl symptoms.

We drove back to state highway 84, and took it nearly all the way to the Pacific coast. The moon had set, and though there was serious light pollution peeping up above the hills to the north, the limiting magnitude straight up was between 6 and 6.5. Several of us could see the tail out to 50 or 60 degrees, and I was suspecting somewhat more, perhaps 80 degrees.

My friends drove home, and I continued to the coast and down to Pomponio Beach, where the light pollution was noticeably less. There I traced the tail out naked-eye almost to the north end of Corvus, approximately 90 degrees. The last 20 degrees were very difficult and marginal, but there was no doubt that the tail extended well south of the Coma cluster, almost to gamma Virginis. The brighter parts of the tail showed rich structure in my 7x35 Tasco binocular ($29.95 at Sears -- an interesting contrast in technological sophistication with the Vixen fluorite), with many rays and streamers. I did not attempt to draw them. The first fifteen or twenty degrees of the core of the tail were markedly brighter than the rest. The comet's motion was obvious in binoculars in a few tens of seconds, and with the naked eye in ten minutes or so. These observations were made at about 0930 UT 26 March, at which time I again estimated the comet's integrated visual magnitude as -0.3 (naked-eye).