SN 2011fe

 DSO, Galaxy  No Responses »
Aug 282011
 

On 24 Aug 2011  the Palomar Tansient Factory detected a ‘star’ that wasn’t there the night before.  What the fully automated system found was the closest type Ia supernova in decades.  As the image below shows, the supernova is in Ursa Major’s Pinwheel galaxy (M 101).  (Click the thumbnail to blink the supernova.)

There are a couple of things that make this discovery special.  The first is how ‘young’ the supernova is.  Since the galaxy was imaged the night before and nothing was visible at that location, the supernova was caught within 24 hours of ignition.  Subsequent imagery shows the supernova is, as expected, continuing to brighten. 

The second thing that makes it special is its proximity.  The Pinwheel galaxy is only 21 million light years away.  The relatively close distance and the resultant increase in apparent brightness (the discovery image measured a 17.2) brings the object into the range of many more scientific instruments.  More telescopes equals more coverage.  Quickly changing events, such as associated with a supernova, could be missed waiting for the earth to rotate a large enough telescope into view. 

I took the supernova image Friday night.  It is a stack of nine 300 second exposures.  The stars magnitude at that time was 13.34.  The other image is an archive image of M 101 that I took in May 2009.  It is also a stack of nine 300 second exposures.

 Posted by at 12:43

More visitors…

 Comet, Meteor, Solar System  No Responses »
Aug 072011
 

The weather has been very spotty recently.  To add to the frustration, work nights leave little time to observe with astronomical twilight not ending until after 9PM.  But a week ago last Thursday the clouds cleared enough so that I was able to get one target of interest covered and then last Thursday the automated motion detection system of the All Sky Cam support software caught another. 

”]Comet C/2009 P1 (Garradd) is currently in the Pegasus constellation.  As the image shows it is fairly bright and it will continue to slowly brighten until Feb of next year.  It will peak just under naked-eye visibility but should be an easy binocular object.

The image is a stack of 120 thirty second exposures with the stack aligned to the comet leaving the stars trailed.  I reported the comet at a magnitude of 11.4.

 

Meteor 20110804 0329:53.512

This is the first motion detection captured by the sky camera’s automated system.  I’ve checked several sources that report satellite positions and this appears to be a legitimate meteor.  It looks like the camera can take and save about 4 frames a second and it archives an image once every minute.  The motion detection system will save the image that the motion is detected on along with the preceding image.  This streak is only on two frames. 

The meteor is quite bright.  The bright object to the right of the left tree line is Jupiter at a magnitude of -2.5.  Vega is visible in the prominent notch on the left edge of the right tree line.  Its magnitude is 0.0. 

 

 Posted by at 05:58