Thank you everyone :) 2007 has been a good year with two lifetime
astronomy goals finally achieved. The first goal was to see a
daylight comet and the second to discover a comet - mission
accomplished!

I use 2 Digital SLR cameras to image the sky, and then process the
images using IRIS then examine them using the blink technique on a
computer monitor. After a very intense search effort in 2006 without
success (one near miss with 2006M4), I had wound back my efforts in
2007 (partly because of 2006P1 and partly because of fatigue!). March
15 was only the second time this year I had done any searches in the
morning sky. While downloading images from the camera on March 15 I
noticed a cometary object at the edge of 16 raw images centred at RA
20h57m DEC -51d 18m made between 17h22m and 17h46m UT. Normally, the
raw unprocessed images show only the brightest objects so I was very
suprised that this could be an undiscovered comet. At first I though
it was simply a bright deep sky object, but after processing the the
intense telltale green hue and generally morphology strongly
suggested comet. Additionally, when I blinked the processed images
it showed small but clear motion. Astrometry quickly revealed no
known object in that location. At this point I was very sure I had
something :)

The following day there was an agonising wait for cometrise (about
midnight from my location) and I notified a number of people for
followup observations. John Drummond being located further east had
the first opportunity to see the comet. Sure enough John phoned me
to confirm the existence of the comet around 11pm local time. Its
the first time I have spoken to John and what a way to introduce
yourself! Dan green contacted me late on March 16 UT to advise me
that the comet had been announced, but as per standard procedure the
comet would not be named until an orbit was calculated and it was
determined the comet was not an existing named one.

All told I estimate I have examined about 1000 image fields since
late 2004, which would equate to about 1000 hours (it takes me 10
minutes to actually examine an image, but there are other time
consuming tasks like setup/development/identifying suspect objects,
etc). Unfortunately I don't keep records on time taken and images
examined.

Rob McNaught informs me that unusually cloudy weather has severly
hampered coverage of the Siding Springs survey. Additionally, I
also checked SWAN this morning and the last posted image is February
18. Moonlight problably explained why visual observers hadn't got to
the comet first.

Here are some of my images of the comet (including the discovery set):

http://www.pbase.com/terrylovejoy/c2007e2

Terry