Anti-tails and shadows
These days, the sky is continually monitored by automated search programmes seeking potentially dangerous asteroids and other astronomical transients. Although comets are not the main object of these searches, inevitably many are found. And it is also inevitable that most of the potentially brighter ones are first recorded well before they reach perihelion. This is good for advanced preparation of observations, but it is not too good for amateur comet hunters.
It therefore came as a welcome surprise on November 7 last year when three amateurs — Don Machholz, Shigehisa Fujikawa and Masayuki Iwamoto —
