We present a summary of the campaign of remoteobservations that supported the European SpaceAgency’s Rosetta mission. Telescopes across the globe(and in space) followed comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from before Rosetta’s arrival untilnearly the end of mission in September 2016. Theseprovided essential data for mission planning, largescalecontext information for the coma and tailsbeyond the spacecraft, and a way to directly compare67P with other comets. The observations revealed67P to be a relatively ‘well behaved’ comet, typicalof Jupiter family comets and with activity patternsthat repeat from orbit-to-orbit. Comparison betweenthis large collection of telescopic observations and thein situ results from Rosetta will allow us to betterunderstand comet coma chemistry and structure. Thiswork is just beginning as the mission ends. In thispaper we present a summary of the ground-basedobservations and early results, and point to manyquestions that will be addressed in future studies.