Comets are known for their tails. These extremely active comets were bright, naked-eye spectacles offering researchers an opportunity to telescopically explore the composition of primordial chunks of our solar system by studying their long and beautiful tails. Ulysses experiments were intended to study the Sun and solar wind and the spacecraft-comet encounter was totally unanticipated. Relative positions of Ulysses and Hyakutake on that date indicate that this comet's ion tail stretched an impressive 360 million miles or about four times the Earth-Sun distance . This makes Hyakutake's tail the longest ever recorded and suggests that comet tails are much longer than previously believed.
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