I post too infrequently on astronomy. The image above is the 1997 Hale-Bopp (credit: By E. Kolmhofer, H. Raab; Johannes-Kepler-Observatory, Linz, Austria (http://www.sternwarte.at) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6756556)
I was recently introduced to this work of the famous English Jesuit poet:
— I am like a slip of comet,
Scarce worth discovery, in some corner seen
Bridging the slender difference of two stars,
Come out of space, or suddenly engender’d
By heady elements, for no man knows:
But when she sights the sun she grows and sizes
And spins her skirts out, while her central star
Shakes its cocooning mists; and so she comes
To fields of light; millions of travelling rays
Pierce her; she hangs upon the flame-cased sun,
And sucks the light as full as Gideon’s fleece:
But then her tether calls her; she falls off,
And as she dwindles shreds her smock of gold
Amidst the sistering planets, till she comes
To single Saturn, last and solitary;
And then goes out into the cavernous dark.
So I go out: my little sweet is done:
I have drawn heat from this contagious sun:
To not ungentle death now forth I run.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Catholic Sensibility 
One of the more famous depictions of a comet in the history of Western art is Giotto’s use of a red-tailed comet (he would have seen what we now know as Halley’s Comet in 1301) as the Star of Bethlehem in his fresco of The Adoration of the Magi in the artistic tour de force that is the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua.
PS: Tinyurl link to PanoSphere of that fresco in the chapel (a viewer can zoom in and out and 360 degrees around for context):
https://tinyurl.com/4kewa3um