I liked Hale-Bopp. I wasn't expecting much after the disappointment of Kohoutek when I was a little kid, but then one evening I looked up and there it was, and it was pretty cool. Hale-Bopp was subtle; you could miss it if you weren't looking in the right place. ISON may be so spectacular that it wold be impossible to miss.
Perhaps my favorite comet up to this point was Shoemaker-Levy[1]. In the nascent internet days, I was working for a company that took interesting things online (such as shareware[2]) and packaged them onto CDs for people who didn't have pipes as fat as our amazing 56k dedicated line. I built a CD of images of Shoemaker-Levy slamming into Jupiter. I was in awe the entire time[3]. I can't even imagine the colossal energies those impacts created.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 40.6 ms ] thread1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy_9
2. Another thing I convinced the owners to do was put together a Linux CD. That laid the foundations for what would eventually become Turbolinux[3].
3. And, even though the interface was in Visual Basic, I was still happy with the output.
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbolinux