C/2006 M4 (SWAN) is a non-periodic comet discovered in late June 2006 by Robert D. Matson of Irvine, California and Michael Mattiazzo of Adelaide, South Australia in publicly available images of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). These images were captured by the Solar Wind ANisotropies (SWAN) Lyman-alpha all-sky camera on board the SOHO. The comet was officially announced after a ground-based confirmation by Robert McNaught (Siding Spring Survey) on July 12. Although perihelion was reached on 28 September 2006, the comet flared dramatically from an outburst, resulting in its apparent magnitude to increase from 7.0 to 4.0 on 24 October 2006, becoming barely visible with the naked eye. The comet later experienced a disruption event on its plasma tail caused by an encounter with a high-speed stream in the solar wind.
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This article is an automated import of the Wikipedia article "C/2006 M4 (SWAN)", available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2F2006_M4_(SWAN) . Text is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.