As the title says, it's pretty much a collection of 42 great comets (comets big and bright enough to be visible to the unaided eye near perihelion) appeared in the last 2000 years, from Ceasar's comet of 44 BC to 1996's Hyakutake.
Some notes:
- Since almost all of these comets passed before the advent of hi-tech telescopes, I assumed a diameter of 20 km for every one, with the following exceptions: Hyakutake (known to be 4.2 km across), fragments (which are sized as 20 km divided by the number of fragments of that comet), and the 1811 one (which was estimated to be around 35 km according to Wikipedia)
- I set the "Epoch" to the perihelion passage date and "MeanAnomaly" to 0, so to find the perihelion passage date, simply bring up the comet's in-game wiki page and look at "Pericenter Epoch" in the "Orbit" page
- Since luminosity also depends on random outbursts of activity, some of these comets are invisible from Earth even during perihelion. Usually they are a few magnitudes under 7 so increasing the minimum magnitude should reveal them.
- Missing from this compilation are Halley, Hale-Bopp, McNaught, and Lovejoy; they're already present in SE's default catalogue.
- For some reason comet tails don't seem to be rendered inside a sunlit atmosphere, so if you want to observe these comets as they appeared from Earth, I suggest to either look from orbit or disable atmospheres (as with the screenshot).
Changelog:
- February 26: First release, then removed non-alphanumerical characters from "de Cheseaux" (GC of 1744)
- February 27: Added GC of 1887, GC of 1865, "Messier" (GC of 1769), and "Sarabat" (GC of 1729); renamed GC of 1881 to "Tebbutt" and GC of 1823 to "de Breaute-Pons"