it reappeared in the morning sky, and developed an extremely long tail. It extended about 45° across the sky on March 11 and was more than 2° wide; the tail was calculated to be more than 300 million kilometers (2 AU) long. This held the record for the longest measured cometary tail until 2000, when Comet Hyakutake's tail was found to stretch to some 550 million kilometers in length. The maximum apparent magnitude attained by this comet was −10. (The Earth–Sun distance—1 AU—is only 150 million kilometers.) The comet was very prominent throughout early March, before fading away to almost below naked eye visibility by the beginning of April. It was last detected on April 20. This comet apparently made a substantial impression on the public, inspiring in some a fear that judgement day was imminent. Eclipse Comet of 1882 A party of observers gathered in Egypt to watch a solar eclipse in May 1882 were greatly surprised when they observed a bright streak near to the Sun once totality began. By a remarkable coincidence, the eclipse had coincided with the perihelion passage of a Kreutz comet. The comet would otherwise have gone unnoticed—its sighting during the eclipse was the only observation of it. Photographs of the eclipse revealed that the comet had moved noticeably during the 1m50s eclipse, as would be expected for a comet racing past the Sun at almost 500 km/s. The comet is sometimes referred to as Tewfik, after Tewfik Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt at the time. Great Comet of 1882 The Great Comet of 1882 was discovered independently by many observers, as it was already easily visible to the naked eye when it appeared in early September 1882, just a few days before perihelion, at which it reached an apparent magnitude estimated to have been −17, by far the brightest recorded for any comet and exceeding the brightness of the full moon by a factor of 57. It grew rapidly brighter and was eventually so bright it was visible in the daytime for two days (16–17 September), even through light cloud. After its perihelion passage, the comet remained bright for several weeks. During October, its nucleus was seen to fragment into first two and then four pieces. Some observers also reported seeing diffuse patches of light several degrees away from the nucleus. The rate of separation of the fragments of the nucleus was such