Comets & Solar Activity

[neilwilkes]

Just wondering.

Has anyone ever correlated the appearance of cometary tails - their intensity, any unusual behaviour (as when Halley started "outgassing" way past the point where Solar Radiation could sublimate "Ice" back in 1991, between the orbits of Saturn & Jupiter.
I was wondering if there were any tie-ins with previous solar cycles & unexpected behaviour, as in cometary encounters that either didn't produce the expected display (does anyone else remember the damp squib that was comet Kohoutek, way back when I was at school) or else produced a display that was completely off the scale at the other extreme - when Hale-Bopp left the inner solar system, for example, and was photographed with a lovely fan tail as well as an ion trail.