The life of a supernova hunter
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| Supernova in galaxy NGC 2146 |
You can look up supernovae on Wikipedia, so I won't waste your time by describing them here. What I would like to talk about, however, is the sport of supernova hunting.
Supernova hunting falls under the umbrella of backyard astronomy. If you were to purchase a telescope to get a closer look at the stars and planets, there are a number of astronomical activities you might eventually become interested in. Like most people, you'll probably be disappointed in the dull-gray eyepiece views of nebulae and galaxies, after seeing brilliantly colorful pictures of them on the internet. I experienced that disappointment for myself back in the 1980's. We common folk didn't have the internet in those years, but the few photographs of deep-sky objects that I saw in books and magazines were far more impressive than what I saw through my telescope's eyepiece! It was a no-brainer. I quickly turned to astrophotography with film, instead of looking at celestial objects in the eyepiece. But having to pack up my telescope and camera gear into my car and drive 50 miles away from city lights, where I'd use a paper star chart and a red flashlight to find my targets with a telescope that was not self-pointing, and sit on my camera case for a chair to guide hour-long exposures by hand with frightening animal noises all around me was no easy endeavor!
These days, astrophotography with digital cameras and computerized telescopes is practically as easy as pie. You don't even need to leave home. It's so easy, in fact, that everybody is doing it! Do a Google search of any deep-sky object (try Messier 42, NGC 253, North America Nebula, etc) and you'll find that amateur astrophotographers have shot just about everything in the heavens! And they've shot everything with better skills and better equipment than you and I will ever have! So, if you're curious about what there is to see up there in the night sky, don't bother buying a telescope. Save yourself the time and money and just Google celestial objects by name and enjoy the millions of pictures that amateurs and professionals have posted online.
As for me, I like doing things myself. I've been a backyard telescope enthusiast since the purchase of my first telescope in 1980 and I've never grown tired of it. During the past 44 years, I've taken pictures of all 110 Messier objects, all the Herschel 2500 objects, all of the Caldwells that I can get from my latitude (about 88 of them), all the Hickson 100 galaxy groups, and all the 338 Arp peculiar galaxies. I've also shot all the major planets (counting Pluto) and the first 100 numbered minor planets, which takes some planning, let me tell you! And I've photographed solar and lunar eclipses, Mercury and Venus transits of the sun, dozens of comets (including Halley and Hale-Bopp). My pictures don't look as good as what you'll see online, but that doesn't bother me. I'm not competing with anyone. In fact, I don't even care what everyone else is doing. To each, his or her own.
But supernova hunting is a completely different animal than your typical astrophotography. It's not about taking pretty pictures. It's about discovery. Not only that, but it's about diligence and patience. Last night for instance, I shot NGC 2146 for the 93rd time since 2016. On all of those previous 92 nights, there was nothing different about the galaxy. But last night, there was a star that wasn't there before! Can you imagine looking at the same galaxy on 93 separate occasions, over a span of 9 years, before you found a supernova in it? As boring as it may seem to the average person, a discovery like this is quite exciting to a supernova hunter!
So how does one start on such a journey? Well, here is my story.
For more than a hundred years, the professional astronomers, with their deep pockets full of billions of dollars of grant money, had the supernova-discovery thing locked up. Using the world's largest telescopes to carry out their research, professional astronomers would occasionally notice a new star in a galaxy they had photographed previously. Do a Google search for supernova discoveries from the 1930's to 1960's and you'll see that supernovae in those years were primarily found by Edwin Hubble, Fritz Zwicky, Milt Humason, Allan Sandage, Nicholas Mayall, and Halton Arp. These were the astronomers getting all the observing time on the world's largest telescopes, and they were the ones making supernovae discoveries, even though their research wasn't necessarily about supernovae.
Historically, this is how supernovae got their names. During a given year, each supernova found by a professional astronomer was reported and confirmed, and then it was counted by using the year and a capital letter of the alphabet. The first supernova found in modern times was (no surprise) in the Andromeda Galaxy in 1885. It was given the designation 1885A. Presumably, had another supernova been discovered in that same year, it would have been called "1885B". But such was not the case. The next reported supernova wasn't until 1895. In that year, there were two supernovae found. The first one was found in NGC 4424 on March 16th. Supernova 1895B was found on July 7th, in NGC 5253. This onesie-twosie discovery of supernovae went on for decades. Only a handful of supernovae were found each year, inadvertently and accidentally.
The alphabetical method of designating supernovae was unchallenged until the year 1954, when they reached 1954Z. Oh, boy! What to do? Naturally, when you reach the end of something, you begin again. So that's what they did. The 27th supernova discovered in 1954 was given the designation "1954aa." The 28th was called "1954ab." In that year, they got only as far as "1954ad" and it seemed the solution of naming supernova this way had been easily handled. But the silly astronomers returned to their unfruitful ways and there wasn't a 2-letter supernova designation again until 1968, when they had to roll out "1968aa" at the close of the year. That situation didn't change for another 20 years. Beginning with 1988, however, supernova discoveries were occurring more frequently and have required at least double letters in every year since. Interestingly, the designation of supernovae using base-26 was the perfect solution at a time when nobody could have predicted how many supernovae would be detected annually, if large telescopes were actually used to find them! The supernova I spotted last night was given the designation "2024abfl." Using base-26, this translates to 19,096 supernova discoveries in 2024 alone! Many thousands of supernovae can be designated with very few characters in base-26!
But what led to this remarkable increase in supernova discoveries? It can be explained in two words: digital imaging.
Beginning in the early 1990's, amateur astronomers armed with digital cameras began outperforming professionals in the discovery of supernovae. It was simply a numbers game. There were far more amateur astronomers than professionals looking for supernovae each night. Photography has always allowed astronomers to see fainter objects than by looking through the eyepiece. But emulsion-based photography was both expensive and wasteful. Professional astronomers could afford to shoot the same objects over and over, but amateurs using film didn't want to waste it. Some amateurs used gas hypering to make their film more sensitive. Every frame on the negative was special. They used their film sparingly and tried to shoot as many different objects as possible on a single roll of 24 or 36 exposures. When you have to travel 100 miles to get to dark sky, and hand-guide hour-long exposures all night, you want to reward your efforts by coming home with pictures of as many different objects as possible. And you certainly wouldn't go out there a month later and shoot the same objects you shot last time! You won't photograph very much of the universe at that rate! Digital imaging, on the other hand, allowed wasteful imaging! Shoot as many pictures as you want. You're not using up any film! Amateur supernova hunters could now see fainter stars and galaxies with their telescopes, and they didn't mind shooting the same targets over and over each night. Furthermore, new computerized telescopes were saving time by locating targets by themselves, and autoguiders were doing all the hard work, making the imaging process effortless and efficient, allowing many more targets to be acquired each night.
Throughout the 1990s, professional astronomers relied on this volunteer army of amateurs to immediately report their discoveries of supernovae, and then the targets could be sent to the professional observatories for more in-depth study of supernovae with more powerful instruments. Eventually, some professional astronomers got into the chase for discovery, and they spent the big bucks on survey telescopes that could go deeper and image the whole sky in a couple of nights. Not only that, but they automated these systems (including software that scans the images for new stars). With instruments like these around the world, the professionals had gained the advantage again. They became less and less dependent on the help of backyard astronomers to discover and report transient objects (comets, asteroids, novae, and supernovae). Of course, the professional astronomers were serving a higher purpose. Their interest was to discover possible earth impactors. For them, it wasn't about the gee-whiz discovery of a new star in a distant galaxy. They wanted early detection of possible killer asteroids and comets, and that task was too important and time-sensitive to be left up to a haphazard group of under-equipped amateurs.
I witnessed the exponential leap of supernova discoveries firsthand throughout the late 1990's and early 2000's. I was working for a CCD camera manufacturer and some of our customers were supernova hunters who were making a lot of the discoveries. I was very interested in the competitive search and discovery process conducted by my fellow amateur astronomers as they tried to outperform the professionals, but my life was busy with work and family commitments, and I wasn't doing any astrophotography of my own in those years.
Big changes came in 2001, when the company I was working for moved out of town, but I stayed behind. I loved Tucson too much and couldn't leave. A few months later, 9/11 turned our world upside down. In 2004, I took a job in the defense industry and lost my connection with the amateur astronomy community.
It was around that same time that I finally gave up using my film camera and started to dabble in digital photography with point-and-shoot cameras from Canon. A lot of photographers like me resisted the change from film to digital photography because we loved the size of our 35 mm format and couldn't afford the expense of getting the same imaging area size in digital cameras. But we also recognized the huge advantages in digital imaging: instant display of pictures, rather than waiting to get our film developed at the One-Hour Photo stores, as well as the power of image-processing on our computers, as opposed to the hassles of dark-room chemicals and processes.
From time to time, I attempted to hold my point-and-shoot digital camera up to the eyepiece of my telescope to capture lunar eclipses. Using that technique, I got some satisfactory results. I think it was around 2006 that I bought a Canon Rebel XT DSLR. I could shoot some night-time, landscape astrophotography through a camera lens, but I didn't make any attempts to capture deep-sky objects through my telescope, because Lumicon had gone out of business and it took me awhile to find out where to buy a Canon bayonet adapter to replace the Pentax adapter on my off-axis guider. Once I figured that out, I was able to capture a Mercury transit in 2006, but deep-sky objects remained difficult because of guiding tolerances. Guiding by hand was far less forgiving with DSLRs than it was with film SLRS.
Then, in 2007, the electronics inside my workhorse 1986 (yeah, the year Halley's Comet returned) Meade 2080 LX3 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope failed. Feeling as though it was time to venture into the 21st century of astronomical-imaging technology, I paid a visit to Starizona here in Tucson, and I purchased Celestron's CPC-1100 SCT, the HyperStar, a Starlight Xpress H9C digital camera, and Diffraction Limited's MaxIm DL CCD software for image processing and camera control.
It took some time to figure out all this new-fangled equipment, but within a few months I had worked out a way to get the scope set up in the back yard and control it over ethernet from the comforts of my kitchen (quick access to the telescope through the sliding-glass door). The fast f/2 optics of the HyperStar permitted shooting 15-second exposures (unguided) with the scope in alt-azimuth mode that didn't require the tedious process of polar alignment necessary with my former SCT. And thanks to image-processing software, I was getting decent pictures (better than I used to get with film and my old 8-inch SCT from a dark-sky site) from the light-polluted suburbs of Tucson, by stacking about twenty 15-second exposures. With the telescope, camera, and focuser being remotely controlled by the computer, there was no reason for me to leave the kitchen until it was time to put the scope away in the morning.
Even with all of this powerful technology, however, I was still only setting up the scope for imaging about once or twice per month. I didn't yet consider using my gear for supernova hunting. I was just shooting pretty pictures. I operated under the same old mindset that I always had with astrophotography: waiting for clear, moonless, weekend nights to shoot some of my old favorite targets. It was good to have a telescope and camera for astrophotography again, and it was amazing to see such good results in urban skies. My telescope got very little use, but it was always ready for whenever I felt like setting it up. During the years from 2007 to 2014, I set up my system for astrophotography on only 75 nights (or an average of about 10 nights per year). But then along came a supernova (SN2014J) in February of 2014. It was a supernova in the popular (amongst amateur astronomers) galaxy M 82 (or Messier 82).
Wanting to get a picture of the supernova, I set up the scope on the same day I heard the news. But it was a mostly cloudy night. I had never before broken my #1 self-imposed rule of astrophotography: Don't bother setting up your telescope on a cloudy night! To make the setup go quicker, I used my DSLR (by this time, I had replaced the Rebel XT with a full-frame Canon 6D) instead of the H9C camera, which required the use of a laptop. The alt-az telescope mount didn't need polar alignment, which would have been tough to do with clouds interfering. All I needed to do now was a "3-star alignment." And I didn't even have to know which stars they were. So I quickly found one bright star through a hole in the clouds, then another, and finally the third. Wow! That was easy! Then I looked over toward M 82 and there was a large cloud covering it. That figured! Undaunted, however, and committed to getting this shot, I entered M 82 in the telescope's hand-control unit. The scope aimed itself at the large cloud and I went inside to wait it out. From inside my kitchen, I sent an occasional command to the camera (which has wi-fi) to take a 3-second exposure at ISO-6400. There was nothing but yellowish cloud (reflecting the sodium vapor streetlighting of the city) for several minutes. Then, all of a sudden, I could see M 82 and its supernova, emerging from the clouds (see below)! Three-second exposure! This was insane!
The experience of shooting a 3-second exposure of a supernova on a cloudy night was a huge paradigm shift for me. For years, I had appreciated the fact that this modern telescope setup was quick and easy compared to my old Meade. I no longer needed to drive for an hour to get to dark skies (film had zero tolerance for city lighting when using the long exposures required for dim, deep-sky objects). No polar alignment. No searching for guide stars. No manual searching for targets and aiming the telescope by hand. But it never occurred to me that the long-standing rules of film astrophotography no longer applied to digital imaging.
First and foremost of the film astrophotography rules was that the sky had to be totally clear. That was because film was slow and required long exposures (up to an hour long), and with film, you couldn't break those long exposures up into shorter ones and stack them. You had to sit there and guide your exposures for an hour in one sitting. While it was theoretically possible to pause an exposure and begin again after a cloud passed by, in practice it was very difficult to get good results that way. Film was too expensive to waste, so I just didn't bother to shoot unless the sky was completely clear and there was no threat of clouds.
The second big rule for film was that you couldn't shoot long exposures when skyglow was present. City lights and moonlight were both showstoppers. Film would fog over with the bright sky background under those conditions, and my target objects would be washed out. When shooting with film, I always packed up my scope and drove far away from the city glow. Shooting under the light-polluted skies of the city was now tolerable with digital imaging, but I continued to stick to the rule regarding moonlight. For my location, moonlight was still worse than city lighting. I didn't do any digital imaging when the moon was up. This rule was particularly frustrating because even though the night was clear (rule #1), I had to pass it up. And every amateur astronomer knows that Mother Nature loves to give us cloudy skies in the dark of the moon; when the clouds finally clear, it's full moon and we still can't use our scopes for deep-sky observing and astrophotography. But I was used to this problem, and I was content to lose the majority of clear nights each month to the moon. It never even entered my mind to just try and shoot under moonlit skies and see what kind of results I'd get.
I don't recall the moon phase on the night when I shot the supernova in M 82, but I was still breaking the first rule by setting up under cloudy skies. I can remember looking at my results and seeing the proof that I didn't need to live by either of those rules anymore! Digital photography can tolerate the bright background sky. And being able to take short exposures means that I really could shoot between clouds if I wanted.
At that point, the quick setup of my 21st-century telescope gave me the motivation to start experimenting with shooting under lousy conditions. With such a little investment of setup time and effort, it was still worthwhile to set up the scope for even an hour of shooting, if I could work around clouds. I could shoot a few hours in the evening on weeknights and not be up past my bedtime. Or if I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't go back to sleep, I could check the sky and maybe get some imaging done for an hour and then go back to bed! Remembering the supernova craze of the 1990's, I felt like I could even get into supernova hunting with a setup like this. I could be shooting galaxies and looking for supernovae just about every night, instead of being limited to clear, moonless weekends.
Supernova hunting is surprisingly not about one's ability to see a new star in a crowded field, while comparing two pictures of a galaxy, taken on different nights. That's the easy part! The difficult part is choosing the right galaxy! Professional astronomers, with larger telescopes than mine, can shoot deeper and record the entire sky in a couple of nights or less. They'll find perhaps a dozen supernovae every single night! But I can't do that.
In the first place, I can't even spend all night every night shooting galaxies. My scope is not autonomous. I have to be present and control everything from sending commands to aim at the next target, take the exposures, and compare tonight's galaxy image with my own eyeballs to a previous picture I've taken, to see if there are any new stars. I can spend only a few hours each night doing that. And I miss a few nights each month due to weather. Sometimes it's too cloudy, even for me!
In the second place, I have just one telescope. I don't have an array of telescopes. My field of view is about 1 degree wide by 1 degree tall. It would take me forever to record the entire night sky visible from my back yard. While my images cover enough sky to sometimes fit several galaxies in one frame, a lot of my exposures target just one galaxy. At this rate, I have set a very low goal to shoot at least 30 galaxies per night. This gives me just shy of 1000 galaxy comparisons per month, or about 10,000 comparisons per year.
If you read between the lines of the preceding paragraphs, you may have already figured out where I'm going with this. Yeah, supernova hunting is a numbers game. It's about how many galaxies you can target and shoot each night, and how many nights per year you can shoot. There are probably more than a trillion galaxies in the universe, but small backyard telescopes like mine can't see them all. And only a small number of them will have supernovae in them on any given night. It's like playing the lottery. The odds of winning are stacked against me. I can improve my odds by buying more tickets, but I don't have deep pockets! So, I spend as much time as I can afford and settle for a handful of discoveries each year.
I began my supernova hunting by first trying to figure out which galaxies I could see using short (15- to 25-second) exposures. I don't need pretty pictures. I just need to see stars down to 16th magnitude. Using short exposures with the CPC-1100 and HyperStar gets me there. It stands to reason that the closer a galaxy is to us, the brighter it and its possible supernovae will appear. Obviously, it's wise to target the nearest galaxies for supernova hunting with a small telescope. Galaxies within about 100 million light years are worthy targets within my reach. Conveniently, galaxies that are in Messier's list of objects, and those of Herschel's 2500 objects, are within that distance from earth and, therefore, make good starting places for building a list of target galaxies.
It took me a few years after the M 82 supernova in 2014 to get myself into the mindset of trying to shoot galaxies every night. It's quite a commitment for an unimportant hobby. After all, I'm not likely ever to become famous by being the first person to spot a particular supernova. And goodness knows I'm not making any money from the effort! Admittedly, it's difficult to justify placing supernova hunting so high on my list of priorities that I'll try to make room for it in my daily schedule.
The primary difference between supernova hunting and pretty-pictures astrophotography is that you need to have a reference image of every galaxy on your target list. And to make things easier, it's best to use your own images, taken with the same setup and exposure times. This can be a deterrent to the would-be supernova hunter! You don't just take a picture of a galaxy and find a supernova. You need to have an older image of the galaxy so that you can see all of the "normal" stars in the field. In other words, you need to build a huge database of reference images before a night of supernova hunting can go smoothly and efficiently. And it's not going to work well if you have to call up each of your older images, one at a time, and compare them to tonight's image. You need to zoom in, crop, and annotate each of your target images and put them into a scrolling viewer of some sort (like a PDF or an HTML page that can be displayed in your web browser). Oh, and one more thing! Arranging your targets by Right Ascension and ordering them by declination will help you to shoot more efficiently because you can just check the time on your sidereal clock and choose one strip of sky and work your way from one target galaxy to the next without large movements of the telescope in between targets.
In the middle of 2016, I set about making my list of targets. I began by using the list of NGC (New General Catalog) objects. I parsed through the 7800+ objects and picked only the galaxies. From that list, I had to delete all the galaxies that are too far south to shoot from my latitude. I settled on galaxies north of -40°. Of those, I began to get a feel for which ones were too small and faint to bother with. Between 2016 and 2017, I shot more than 6,000 unique galaxies. From those I added only about 1500 to my targets list. For reasons that are too wordy to go into here, I avoided galaxies that cross my meridian within +/- 10 degrees from the zenith. I also avoided galaxies that were lower than -30° declination, because of the many blockages of those objects by trees and distant buildings and hills from my back yard. These were problematic parts of the sky that would serve only to waste my imaging time. I needed to shoot efficiently.
By the middle of 2017, I had shot my own images of all my targets, so I was armed and ready to go supernova hunting at any time of night. If I had time in the evening, I'd set up the scope, check the time on my sidereal clock, then pick the corresponding list of galaxies. That is, if the sidereal clock says "23:00," I shoot my list of galaxies that lie at 23h of Right Ascension. It's very straightforward. No prior planning needed for any imaging session, no matter how unexpected, because it's already been done. Each of my 24 lists of targets is arranged north to south. Typically, I start at the bottom of the list and work my way up, since the southern targets are lowest in the sky, and as time passes, I'm shooting galaxies that will be progressively higher up in the sky.
Below is a screen capture of a portion of my 12-hour galaxies list in a web browser. I squeeze the browser window horizontally, so that it fits side by side with current images coming in from the camera. Note that the HyperStar produces images that are mirrored horizontally, so keeping my reference images mirror-reversed makes it easy to do quick comparisons and then scroll to the next target in the list.
With this system in place, I began working on ways to motivate myself to shoot more galaxies. I keep track of how many galaxies I shoot each night and how many nights of imaging I get each year, and I try to improve those numbers year by year. For example, if I feel tired and want to shut down the gear for the night, I first check and see where my numbers are. If I'm only a few galaxies away from beating last month's tally, I'll keep shooting. Or if it's partly cloudy and I don't really feel like setting up the scope, I'll check my numbers and see if getting one more imaging night this month will beat the same month from last year. If so, I'll set up the scope and shoot between the clouds for a few hours just to beat my previous score. Playing silly games like this keeps me actively searching for supernovae.
So, what have I learned from all this data I have accumulated on my computer and notebooks over the past 9 years? Well, for one thing, I learned that at my old house on Tucson's west side, I could easily get 300 nights of imaging per year. For the years 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, I got 317, 304, 309, and 307 nights of imaging, respectively. Since moving to the north side, closer to the Santa Catalina mountains, I get more clouds and thus have fewer imaging nights per year. For 2021, 2022, and 2023, by comparison, I've achieved only 250, 209, and 282 nights per year, respectively. In 2024, I'm at 244 imaging nights and there are now only 39 days left in the year. So that'll make 4 years in a row, despite trying my very best, that I can't get 300 nights of imaging at this location.
As for the galaxy numbers, I've proven what I've always suspected, and that is: Supernova hunting is hard! You look at ten thousand galaxies and find less than 5 supernovae! According to my records, I've made 68,639 galaxy comparisons to date since mid-2016, and I've found only 21 supernovae. That means, on average, I can expect to look at 3,268 galaxies before I find a supernova.
Because of my large collection of images, I've made other discoveries along the way, too. You'll see in some of my other posts that I've "discovered" long-period variable stars, comets, and asteroids in the same images I use for supernova hunting.
A more pragmatic way to look at it, though, is that I spent about $7000 on my equipment, then proceeded to use it on 2,500 nights to take pictures of over 68,000 galaxies, in order to spot 21 supernovae that other astronomers around the world had already discovered! Essentially, it's a total loss for my time and money spent.
What does that make me? Crazy?
Maybe so. But I still enjoy my activity in this hobby. I'd probably feel lost without it, so I keep up the search. And deep down inside of me there is a fascination with supernovae that I cannot shake.
Just look at that tiny star arrowed in the picture at the top of this page. That represents the destruction of a star that was once perhaps 10 times more massive than our sun. At the end of its life, it simply exploded. I wonder, within its vicinity, were there planets with intelligent life? Did they witness its brilliant light during their daylight hours? Were they affected by its hazardous radiation? Were they destroyed? If their host galaxy is 68 million light years from ours, then they perished long before we existed.
This is what gets me. The light from that supernova began its journey to us 68 million years ago. For nearly 99% of its travel time, we modern humans here on earth didn't even exist. Not only that, but it was only within the past 150 of those 68 million years that we even had the capability to view its light, thanks to the many improvements to telescopes, the discovery of deep-sky objects, and the invention of photography. Think about it. When the light from this supernova had 400 years of travel time left to reach earth, Galileo was arguably the first person in the history of the world to turn a telescope toward the heavens, and it took over 100 more years for people like Charles Messier and William Herschel to discover and publish their lists of star clusters and nebulae. Within 100 years of travel time to reach earth, the 200-inch Palomar telescope hadn't been built yet, and astronomers didn't even know what a "galaxy" was! Within 70 years of remaining travel time, I wasn't even born yet! With 20 years left to go, I didn't have a telescope and camera to capture it. By the time its light was still one year from reaching earth, I had shot its host galaxy 82 times and didn't see anything yet.
But now, 5 days after it reached earth, I picked up the light. Its light will continue to flow through and beyond us for possibly the next 6 months. What do I do with this experience and knowledge? What am I to think of this lonely star that exploded millions of years ago in a galaxy far, far away? I am not a robot. I have feelings. I sit and watch and wonder at the images coming down from my camera in near real-time. Unlike the professionals with their automated equipment that records and reports their dozens of nightly findings without human intervention, this one supernova is significant to me. Shall I ponder the destruction of a civilization? Is it my responsibility to bear witness and hold a memorial for the death of a race? The death of a society? A people?
As I celebrate my 21st discovery of a supernova, using my own gear and search program, I must raise a glass and make a toast to what might have been the brilliant demise of a people just like me. Sixty-eight million years ago. I also wonder...how many others in our galaxy or another one elsewhere in the universe, saw or will see the light of this same supernova, and ponder over it just like I did?
Update: December 2, 2024
Tonight, I discovered my 22nd supernova. It's my 5th discovery of 2024. And, of course, this supernova had already been discovered by someone else (ATLAS) on November 22nd. I can't win! Note the designation, though: SN2024abup. That corresponds to the 19,490th discovery of 2024. My previous discovery was SN2024abfl (or the 19,096th discovery of 2024). That supernova was officially discovered only 7 days prior to SN2024abup. So, while it took me 12 days to discover one supernova, all of the other supernova hunters throughout the world discovered a combined total of 394 supernovae in 7 days. That implies an average of 56.3 supernova discoveries per day, worldwide. Crazy! And to think that when I started out in backyard astronomy in 1980, astronomers were still finding fewer than 26 supernovae per year. We've come a long way, Baby!
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