Jedolby

Imagine if you wanted to begin searching for supernovae by just shooting random galaxies every night and looking for new stars in your images. How many nights do you think it would take before you'd find a supernova? Or what if you wanted to search for asteroids by shooting galaxies that are in zodiac constellations and waiting to find an asteroid passing nearby to a galaxy? How long would that take to find your first asteroid? Of course, you could get lucky and find either a supernova or an asteroid on your first night of trying. But I was not that lucky! It took me nearly two years to find my first supernova (which had already been discovered several months before I found it). It took longer than two years before I was "fooled" for the first time by an asteroid close to one of my target galaxies. Not long after midnight on January 27th, after 10 years of searching for supernovae, I finally "discovered" an asteroid and a supernova in the same field of view! Wh...

  The other night, I thought I discovered a supernova in NGC 3621. When I checked online for supernova discoveries, there were none reported for galaxy NGC 3621. Weird. I've always assumed that any supernova that I come across will have already been discovered by the pro's. Wow! Maybe my discovery is legit! Or maybe, I thought, all of the pro teams hadn't yet reported their discoveries. But the following morning, when there were still no reports of supernova discoveries in NGC 3621, I began to have doubts. I continued to check in all day long and there were still no reports for NGC 3621. Weirder.  I haven't yet figured out how to report a possible supernova, but I sent an email to David Bishop of the Rochester Astronomy website. He said there weren't any reports of a supernova in NGC 3621, but that there was a supernova in that galaxy last year: 2024ggi. Hmmm. That jogged my memory. Back in April of 2024, supernova 2024ggi was so bright that it caught the attention ...

  H27-4, "The Ghost of Jupiter" In the final decades of the 1700's, the German-British astronomer William Herschel and his sister Caroline conducted a survey of the heavens. Together they discovered and produced a list of 2500 star clusters and nebulae that they published in three separate catalogs. Night after night, using a telescope of 18.7 inches in aperture and 20 feet in length, William, making his discoveries at the telescope eyepiece in the garden, called out the positions and descriptions of his celestial objects to his sister through an open window of their house, and she wrote down all the details by candlelight. It was a colossal effort that took them 19 years to complete, and meanwhile, William continued to build telescopes and conduct other scientific experiments in the daylight hours.  You can read all about the Herschels on Wikipedia, so I needn't repeat any more of their story here. However, in modern times, their 2500-object survey still manages to a...

  There's nothing more blatantly honest than a graphical representation of data. You may ask, "How did 2024 treat you?" And I may answer, "Pretty good." But how do we quantify what we're talking about? Well, in the first place, if we're quantifying the "goodness of 2024," we need to decide on a subject area. For instance, we could ask about our health, our finances, or our love life in 2024. And in the second place, we need to compare 2024 to previous years, to get a feel for whether 2024 was better or worse than all the others that came before it. Thirdly, we need some way to measure the joy.  Since my blog is about backyard astronomy, it is appropriate for me to ask, on this first day of 2025, "How was 2024, in terms of stargazing opportunities?" Amateur astronomers are not always the best note takers! Some of us may keep meticulous records of our observations, while others of us can't be bothered with the chore of writing thing...