I went out last night to watch the sunset by the shore of Port Phillip Bay (the best place for an unobstructed horizon around here) and to try to see comet 2006 P/1 (McNaught). The picture you see here was not, alas, taken by me, but by a photographer in Austria. There was way too much glare in the sky due to high-altitude haze yesterday, and there were clouds obscuring the horizon as well. It was a long shot, anyway, as the comet was just one degree away from the Sun.
Today would supposedly be a better day for seeing it from here, as it will be several degrees above the horizon at sunset. However, the day is not only cloudy but also seriously smoky, and I don't think anything will be visible at all; even the Sun is barely visible...
Our northern hemisphere colleagues certainly had quite a spectacle in the last few days, with the comet being clearly visible even during the day and being significantly brighter than Venus during the weekend; there are several amazing pictures all over the net, with a nice gallery at Space Weather.
The comet has already started to move away from the Sun and it will lose brightness very quickly; it will probably still be visible to the naked eye for a week or so, and it should be easy to spot from southern hemisphere locations (at least from locations without as much smoke in the air as Melbourne...), although possibly not in the middle of the day without binoculars (and, if you use binoculars, be very, very careful to avoid the Sun; make sure that you are in the shadow of a building and that there is no chance at all of accidentally looking at the Sun). I'll keep an eye on the sky and will try to get pictures, if possible.
For observations over the next few days, from Melbourne, it will be visible before sunrise starting from the 19th towards the south-east; this image shows the position of the comet at 6am, as seen from Melbourne, for the next 30 days. The sun is rising after 6:15am on all those days.
In the evening, it is setting after the Sun starting from last Saturday (the 13th), and will be 10 degrees above the horizon at sunset on Wednesday (17th), a bit to the left of the Sun; that will probably be the best day to see it from here, as it should still be quite bright. The sun sets at 20:43 (summer time) on that day. The weather forecast for Wednesday is talking about a thunderstorm late in the afternoon, though...
It might be interesting to note that this comet was discovered by an Australian astronomer, Robert McNaught, on August 7 last year while working at the Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran, NSW.
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