Thanks Nick – Looking at its trajectory, I doubt that it is visible because of a bright outburst, rather it looks that it could have been discovered by an amateur survey in the morning sky when at a solar elongation of about 70 degrees and visible from the southern hemisphere – that would have been during the previous dark lunation, several weeks before its actual discovery by the ASASSN team.
I also see there may be some issue about the poorly chosen acronym, ASASSN, when it comes to the MPC/CBAT ascribing a discoverer’s name to this comet. No name has yet been issued. ATEL #10597 describes this object as Comet ASASSN1, which in my book is incorrect. The survey that discovered it refer to themselves as ASAS-SN so it should be Comet C/2017 O1 (ASAS-SN) – the IAU stoppeda while ago adding numbers following the name.