[5] It was the brightest comet in over 40 years, and was easily visible to the naked eye for observers in the Southern Hemisphere in January and February 2007.

[8] McNaught discovered the comet in a CCD image on 7 August 2006 during the course of routine observations for the Siding Spring Survey, which searched for Near-Earth Objects that might represent a collision threat to Earth.

From August through November 2006, the comet was imaged and tracked as it moved through Ophiuchus and Scorpius, brightening as high as magnitude +9, still too dim to be seen with the unaided eye.

[citation needed] Upon recovery, it became apparent that the comet was brightening very fast, reaching naked-eye visibility in early January 2007.

[9] The comet entered SOHO's LASCO C3 camera's field of view on 12 January,[9] and was viewable on the web in near real-time.

[9] Due to its proximity to the Sun, the Northern Hemisphere ground-based viewers had a short window for viewing, and the comet could be spotted only during bright twilight.

In Australia, according to Siding Spring Observatory at Coonabarabran, where the comet was discovered, it was to have reached its theoretical peak in brightness on Sunday 14 January just after sunset,[14] when it would have been visible for 23 minutes.

It will be a serious challenge for us theoreticians and computer modellers to figure out the physics Prof. George Gloeckler, the principal investigator on the Solar Wind Ion Composition Spectrometer (SWICS), said the discovery was important as the composition of comets told them about conditions approximately 4.5 billion years ago when the Solar System was formed.

Using JPL Horizons, the barycentric orbital elements for epoch 2050 generate a semi-major axis of 2050 AU and a period of approximately 92,700 years.