Discovering an asteroid and a supernova with a single shot

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! What are the chances? 

Well, actually, I have the data to help you more accurately figure out those chances! 

For one thing, I can tell you that finding a supernova in NGC 2744 came after 50 separate nights of shooting that galaxy over the course of 10 years! For another thing, I can add that finding a supernova in NGC 2744 and an asteroid next to NGC 2752 in the same image came after making 70,986 galaxy comparisons throughout those 10 years!

Maybe not a once-in-a-lifetime rare event. Or even as rare as seeing a total solar eclipse. But probably about as rare as seeing a Mercury transit of the sun.

The only difference here is that you can search the internet and find out when and where you'll get to see the next total solar eclipse or the next Mercury transit. But nobody can say for sure when the next supernova is going to appear in any of my 1500+ target galaxies.

So maybe this puts things in perspective. Imagine that you couldn't look up the next Mercury transit on the internet, and the only way for you to see one for yourself would be to just start looking at the sun (with proper filter, of course) every day until you "discover" Mercury's tiny silhouette somewhere on the sun's giant disc.

Before you get all excited about experiencing a discovery like that, be warned that it's not going to happen until at least 2032 (not visible in the United States)!


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