The Mahasamadhi Comet

This comet is very special. It orbits the sun every seven years. A dramatic outburst increased the comet’s brightness by over a million times on October 24.

Just a day before, on October 23, the comet was 25,000 times too faint to see with just your eyes. Suddenly, 13 days after October 11, it has gotten about a million times brighter. Now you can just look up in the sky and see it, even inside a city.

From: Sri Chinmoy Answers

Question: What is the significance of a comet?

Sri Chinmoy: When something most precious leaves the
earth-consciousness, then a comet will be visible. From the
spiritual point of view, when you see a comet, something very
significant has taken place on earth. When Sri Ramana Maharshi
passed on, everybody saw a comet in the South Indian sky.

A striking photo of the Mahasamadhi Comet

From: Comet.com

A small and very faint comet has surprised observers around
the world by overnight becoming bright enough to see with the
unaided eye.

Comet Holmes, which was discovered in November 1892 by Edwin
Holmes, in London England, was no brighter than magnitude 17
in mid-October— that's about 25,000 times fainter than the
faintest star that can normally be seen without any optical
aid. In order to view an object this faint, one would need a
moderately large telescope.

But the comet's brightness has suddenly rocketed all the way
up to 3rd-magnitude, brightening nearly 400,000-times in less
than 24- hours! On this astronomers scale, smaller numbers
mean brighter objects. From urban locations, a 3rd-magnitude
object might be hidden by light pollution, but under rural
skies it would be clearly visible...

[Thank-you to Vlad Zorin and Sandesh for pointing out the Mahasamadhi Comet.]