Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Comet Machholz, formally designated C/2004 Q2, is a long-period comet discovered by Donald Machholz on August 27, 2004. It reached naked eye brightness in January 2005. Unusual for such a relatively bright comet, its perihelion was farther from the Sun than the Earth's orbit. Given the orbital eccentricity of this object, different epochs can generate quite different heliocentric unperturbed two-body best-fit solutions to the aphelion distance of this object.