As I discuss in my Comet Page, at the end of 2024 I "retired" from my lifelong activity of systematic visual comet observing. It thus seems appropriate to perform a detailed statistical analysis of all the visual comet observations I made throughout all those years. There may not be any formal scientific significance to this, and of course there are numerous selection effects involved (such as my increasing capabilities as an observer over time as well as the increasing rate of comet discoveries over that same interval). But, it is important and interesting to me -- and perhaps, to others as well -- so, for whatever it is worth, I now present such an analysis.

As of the end of 2024 my comet tally stood at 760, which included 533 separate comets (the remainder being additional returns of various periodic objects within that group of 533). There were a total of 8147 visual observations of all these comets.

Although I have "retired" from systematic visual comet observing, I have not necessarily walked away from it altogether, and I expect I will continue to make occasional observations of bright and/or interesting comets, although this will not be on any kind of systematic basis. In January 2025 I in fact observed such a comet, Comet ATLAS C/2024 G3 (no. 761), and on the evening of February 2, 2025, in order to mark the 55th anniversary of my first comet observation I obtained an observation of Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 (no. 498) which, somewhat coincidentally, had just undergone a new outburst. I have included these additional observations within the analysis, which accordingly encompasses 761 apparitions of 534 separate comets, and a total of 8150 visual observations.

The overall analysis consists of two parts, available in PDF format via the below links:

PART I: A detailed and comprehensive observational and statistical analysis of all the comets and observations. There is an introductory section which defines the various terms and parameters that I utilized in performing the analysis.

PART II: "One Hundred Comet Observations." I have compiled a list of what I consider to be the 100 most interesting, scientifically important, and other notable comet observations I have made over the 55 years I have been observing these objects. Many of these are observations that are associated in some way or other with events going on in my personal life at the respective times. I have written short accounts -- typically, two to three paragraphs in length -- for each of these observations, describing the observations themselves as well as placing them within whatever larger contexts may be appropriate.

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