Last night I was finally able to observe Comet C/2001 A2 Linear, currency in Pegasus, from my backyard in Benicia.
I had earlier set-up my 4" Takahashi refractor to cool down in the hopes of catching it around midnight. However, when I went outside at midnight I was greeted by waves of fast moving low fog clouds that we sometimes get in the Delta this time of the year. Not to be deterred, between short breaks in the clouds I polar-aligned the Tak and did a one star alignment with the Sky Commander. I punched in the coordinates for one of my favorite globulars, M15 and swung the scope around to it and was surprised to see how nice it looked, given the windy conditions. It was also fairly high up so there was hope for picking up the comet. So I punched in the coordinates for the comet that I'd gotten from MegaStar and Wow!! there it was. It looked huge! Much bigger than M15. I could actually see it through the Tak's 7x50 finderscope! It would have been an easy binocular target.
For the next 30 minutes I tried virtually every eyepiece in my box. Best views were with my 27mm PanOptic and my 14mm Pentax XL. It was sitting at the base of an equilateral triangle of 3 stars. It has a very large somewhat fan-shaped (but no definite tail) coma with a much brighter central condensation and a small bright star-like nucleus. I couldn't detect any movement against the background stars over the short time I was observing. The coma definitely was improved by using the Lumicon Swan filter.
It's the best comet I've seen since Comet Lee a couple of years ago. Even my wife was impressed! I observed it for about 30 minutes and then it was gone - lost in a complete whiteout of cloud cover. It was definitely one of those little events that I'll long remember and which makes astronomy such a great hobby.