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I’m not quite sure that ‘explosion’ is the right word for it, but apparently if it were not completely cloudy and rainy here, I’d be able to see the 17P/Holmes comet having brightened from magnitude 17ish to nearly magnitude 2. This takes it from a very faint smudge in a large telescope to a bright naked eye star, with clear non-stellar detail viewable in binoculars and better.

Alas, it’s going to be horribly cloudy and rainy for days yet, I hope I’ll actually be able to get a look at this before the outburst is over and it dims back to normal.