Jedolby

The year was 1987. I had been a backyard astronomer since 1980. During those 7 years, I felt like I had made good progress in the hobby. I was on my 4th telescope, a Meade 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain. I had tracked down nearly half of the Messier objects. I had seen the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. I was practiced at the art of astrophotography with color negative film, having shot a lunar eclipse in 1982, Halley's Comet in 1985 and 1986, and numerous deep-sky objects at the prime focus of my 8-inch f/5 Newtonian reflector. So, when I received the May issue of Astronomy magazine in 1987, and saw the article on page 100, titled "Where to Find Pluto[:] Spring and Summer 1987," I felt ready to accept the challenge to take a photo of the most distant planet in the solar system.  To be honest, before reading that article, I had never given any serious thought to hunting down Pluto. I didn't know much about it. Nobody did. I knew that it wouldn't look like m...

I checked in on U Geminorum again last night and found that it was still hanging in there at near maximum brightness. Blinking last night's image with the one from three nights prior revealed that the star dimmed very slightly. Perhaps by a tenth of a magnitude. Difficult to notice without running it through the "time filter." Although the brightness difference in U Gem is subtle over a period of just three nights, another "star" in the field became very noticeable! It turned out to be the asteroid (240) Vanadis. On the night that I took the first image, the asteroid was just outside the frame. Three nights later, the asteroid had moved into the field of view, below U Gem. The time filter gave very good contrast to the asteroid!  Like other filters, the time filter doesn't show you something that you couldn't see without it. It just makes it stand out better. If you've ever used a UHC (ultra-high contrast) filter to look at a nebula through the teles...

  Tonight, I witnessed a supernova explosion in galaxy NGC 5957. As usual, I was not the first to see it. As a matter of fact, I last photographed NGC 5957 on March 25th, and there was no supernova in it. But the very next night, the supernova was discovered! I shot it one day too soon! At least in this case, a fellow amateur astronomer, Koichi Itagaki, got credit for the discovery. He picked it up and reported it before all the big professional surveys got their grubby paws on it, which is pretty impressive! The designation "fvw" translates to the 4,651st supernova discovery of 2025.  Supernovae can be seen for up to a year after their eruptions, so supernova hunters like me can gradually get around to finding them long after the official discovery. But as far as I'm concerned, I "discovered" this supernova, too! I do my best to avoid the spoiler alerts and, if their host galaxies happen to be on my target lists, I will come across them sooner or later, as I di...

A few weeks ago, I saw an online article about U Gem being due for a flareup. It's kind of a weird variable star, because it has a lot of uncertainty. It could flare up any day, or it might take another 3 months. Who knows? I figured I'd take some reference pictures so that I'd be prepared. Of course, like other long-period variables, I tend to forget about them! I took images of U Gem on March 27th, 29th, and 30th, and then lost interest. I told myself that I would try and remember to come back and follow up later. I even put a Post-It note on my computer monitor to remind me, but somehow, I ignored it. Tonight, I finally remembered. Oh, yeah.... I should check in and see what ol' U Gem is doing! And wow! Was I in for a surprise! It was several magnitudes brighter than the last time I shot it! I hope I'm not in trouble for using the copyrighted AAVSO chart. I thought it would be cool to show a direct comparison of their finder chart with the two images of my anima...

Even I have to admit it: supernova hunting is boring. I take pictures of 10,000 galaxies per year, on average, and I'll find only 5 supernovae in that time period. Another way to look at it is that I shoot galaxies on 250+ nights per year. Thus, you could either say that I look at 9,995 galaxies per year and don't find a supernova in any of them, or you could say that I search for supernovae on 245 nights per year and don't make a discovery. That's a lot of time spent, and a lot of galaxies imaged with no discoveries made! Now you take ol' M 95 here, for instance. I've shot this galaxy on 73 nights over the past 10 years, and I've never discovered a supernova in it. In 2012, I heard about a supernova in M 95, and I took some pictures of it. But that wasn't a "discovery" for me. And I haven't seen a supernova in it since then. So, you could also say that I've been looking at this galaxy for 13 years without finding a supernova in it. Yea...