Marylanders won't see it until the skies clear - maybe Sunday. But backyard stargazers elsewhere are buzzing about Comet 17P/Holmes, which suddenly brightened by a factor of a million this week, becoming visible to the naked eye, even in urban areas.

The comet is visible high in the sky for most of the night. The star map above shows Holmes' location in the northeast, after sunset. The view will get easier later in the evening as the Earth turns and the stars on this map rise higher in the sky. Sky & Telescope posted this today on Holmes. Here's a photo gallery.

Unlike comets Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake a decade ago, Holmes doesn't yet have that classic comet look, with a bright nucleus and a sweeping tail. Those who've seen it describe it as a new "star" to the naked eye, and interloper in the constellation Perseus, at least for those familiar enough with Perseus to know what it's supposed to look like. But in even small backyard telescopes and binoculars, it has a broader, almost spherical appearance as compared with a star, which looks like a pinpoint of light. Holmes looks more like a billiard ball or a fuzz ball.

According to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Holmes was discovered in 1892 by an amateur astronomer named Edwin Holmes. Much as with the current apparition, Holmes brightened suddenly around the time Holmes discovered it. It later faded, then brightened again before it disappeared.

Astronomers calculate that Homes orbits the sun once every seven years. But it never gets closer to the sun than 200 million miles, twice the Earth's distance from the sun. That makes it hard to see. After spotting it again in 1899 and 1906, astronomers lost track of it until 1964.

This time, it was returning to the inner solar system as a very dim 17th magnitude object, 25,000 times too faint to see with the naked eye. On Wednesday, it suddenly perked up to a magnitude 7. And now observers are calling it a Mag. 2 or 3. Smaller positive numbers mean brighter objects, and on this logarithmic scale, that's a million-fold increase in brightness.

In practical terms it means it's about as bright as the stars of the Big Dipper, plenty bright enough to see with the naked eye, even under suburban skies if you know where to find it. But it's always better to escape to less light-polluted places.

Nobody knows how long Holmes will stay this bright, or even why. It may have broken apart, or simply thrown off a bunch of gas and dust as it got nearer to the sun and its warmth. We're sure to see more pictures and hear more speculation as we wait for our skies to clear.