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With the advent of Pan-Starrs and LSST, discovering objects will become a lot harder for amateurs, which is already quite hard with LINEAR, CSS, SDSS, ... taking the bulk of discoveries of comets, asteroids and supernovae. There will still be some opportunities. I these surveys generally do not operate during dusk and dawn, creating a gap where amateurs can look for comets and supernovae. Some amateurs already do this to beat LINEAR, CSS and other surveys.

Amateurs have two huge advantages over professionals: time and numbers. An amateur can devote years to a dedicated observation program, monitoring the same object for hours after each other, and they can band together to create a large geographical coverage. These are thing pro's can only do on very special occasions. Some examples are:

• Occultations of stars by asteroids: Geographical coverage is very important to get the best data. You cannot move professional observatories to the narrow path of these occultations, often only miles wide. These observations can be used to refine the orbits of the asteroids involved, and give better size and shape estimates.
• Fireball and meteor observations: again geographical coverage is essential. This used to be a mostly visual branch of observations, but in the past years photographic and video observations have lead to a great increase of observations and led to the discovery of new swarms, better forecasts of outbursts, etc... Needless to say that knowledge in this field is pretty interesting for the space industry.
• Photometry of variable stars, comets and asteroids: Surveys such as Pan-Starrs can only image an object once a day or less, while prolonged fine grained observations can lead to better insights. Outbursts (large increases in brightness) of comets are often discovered by amateurs, because professionals cannot track all comets (dozens at each given moment). Asteroid ligthcurves can give insight in their shape and rotation period. Lightcurves of variable stars are valuable sources of data. Amateurs are almost always the discoverers of outburst of unpredictable or cataclysmic variables.
• Some amateurs have embarked on exo-planet searches with the transit method, which again amounts to monitoring stars on a fine grained timescale. Except for redetections of known exoplanets I do not know of any success here.

You mean like Hale-Bopp in 1995? http://cometography.com/lcomets/1995o1.html. The great comet of 1811 was another one.

With all this nonsense about UFOs flying around, I'd like to point that there is something actually interesting on SOHO's LASCO C3 camera images right now. The comet Kudo-Fujikawa has entered the camera's field of view. See the "live" pictures at the SOHO site. The comet is entering from the top of the picture.

If you want lots of information and pix about the comet, try this site:

Cometography