Abstract
This is an area where the advent of automated searches has had a very great effect. At the time these words are being written in early 2016, a little over 5 years have passed since the latest visual discovery of a comet. This is strikingly different from the situation prior to about 1995. Back then, it was a rare year that did not bring forth several comets discovered by amateur astronomers systematically sweeping the skies with wide-field telescopes or large binoculars. The typical magnitude of these comets at the time of their discovery was between 8 and 10, relatively bright on the scale of telescopic objects.
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Seargent, D.A.J. (2017). Visual Comet Hunting. In: Visually Observing Comets. Astronomer's Pocket Field Guide. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45435-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45435-1_8
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Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-319-45435-1
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