Sungrazing comet C/1979 Q1, the first comet discovered via satellite. It was imaged with the coronagraph onboard the US Navy's Solwind satellite. This comet peaked at a magnitude of -4 or -5, comparable to Venus (which conveniently is visible at the left side of the frame).

The comet was noted to have caused an unusual brightening in the solar corona, which at the time was interpreted as a possible effect of the comet hitting the sun. This effect was never seen in subsequent bright comets imaged by Solwind, the Solar Maximum Mission, or SOHO...

What probably happened, based on experience with bright sungrazers seen in SOHO, is that the comet disintegrated into a cloud of small debris. At the relatively low-resolution of Solwind, this probably would not have been recognizable as such.

What makes me suspect this is that in the frames taken around 1400 UT, you can see a faint fading streak moving outbound at about the 1 o'clock position near the inner dark bullseye -- this might be the fading rocky debris following the comet's orbit.

The dust cloud and vapor are more easily pushed by the solar wind, and if the comet disintegrated shortly before perihelion, these would probably quickly be pushed out of their orbital trajectory, resulting in the brightening seen at the 11 o'clock position.

Anyway, it's a cool data point. I also think as one of the brighter sungrazing comets spotted by satellite, it serves as a natural bridge between the sungrazers discovered prior to 1979, of which we saw the brightest handful...

...and those after 1979, where we started to get a much clearer picture of what was actually up there. SOLWIND-1 slots very nicely in between those two populations. Not quite bright enough to be discovered from the ground, yet in the brightest few percent observed from space.

Note on the name: Sungrazers were assumed to be relatively rare at the time (only 9 had been reported in the literature prior to this comet's discovery), so the name was assigned given in the traditional manner, with the last names of three codiscoverers in order of priority.

In this case, it was Russel Howard (the technician analyzing the data), Martin Koomen, and Don Michels (the instrument designers and Principal Investigators). Once it was clear this was not just a one-off discovery (and as more personnel were involved in analysis)...

...the team reverted to naming the comets after the satellite, which is an approach that's been adopted by subsequent satellite missions and large ground-based NEO surveys.

Having a slightly different look at this...stacked some frames from the day before and differenced them with images from the comet's death plunge.

The comet's debris takes a pretty long time to clear out! There's still some of the tail faintly visible at the end of the loop, which is nearly 28 hours after the comet entered the frame.

Can't clearly see the feature I pointed out at the 2 o'clock position in the 1400 UT raw images, so I assume it doesn't exist.

I swear I remember seeing the fading dust tail of a sungrazer behave like this in SOHO imagery, but I can't remember exactly which one? @SungrazerComets, would you happen to know?