In 1858, the Donati Comet was first seen and named after its discoverer, Giovanni Battista Donati, at Florence. It was the second-brightest comet of the nineteenth century It reached perihelion on 30 Sep 1858. When nearest the earth on 9 Oct 1858, it was about 0.5 AU away, and had developed a scimitar-shaped triple tail. At that time, its very prominent dust tail had with an apparent length of 50°, more than half the distance from the horizon to the zenith, a linear distance of over 72 million km (about 45 million mi). It was the first comet to be photographed. With an orbital period estimated at more than 2000 years, it will not return until about the year 4000. An astronomical unit, AU, equals 93 million miles, the Sun-Earth distance.