Supernova #25

 


The sky was clear, but a bright full moon was rising low in the southeastern sky. My solution was to shoot galaxies in the northwestern sky, far away from the moon. Although my sidereal clock showed 14:33 at the start of my session, I chose my list of targets at 13 hours of Right Ascension, an hour-and-a-half west of the meridian. 

I like the 13-hour list of galaxies. It includes the impressive Whirlpool Galaxy, M 51, the curious Sunflower Galaxy, M 63, and at the southern end of the list (for me, in the northern hemisphere), there is the beautiful face-on spiral galaxy, M 83, in Hydra. I never tire of these targets. They are standouts amongst the many smaller and uninteresting elliptical galaxies on my lists. 

Last night, I moved on from M 63 and shot NGC 5005, which is a smaller version of M 63. Nothing new there, so I sent the scope onto my next target, NGC 5033. Although the bright center of NGC 5033 appears smaller than NGC 5005, its faint but sprawling spiral arms make it a larger and finer galaxy to view. My 20-second exposures of NGC 5033 do not do it justice. 

As I looked at the first image of NGC 5033, I noticed a small, dim object near the nucleus of the galaxy. Comparing it to an older image I took, the object wasn't a lot different than the bright condensation of starlight or something that's always seen in that location. However, this object looked more stellar, so I decided to blink the image with one of my older ones and see if there's really something new there or not. To my surprise, the blink revealed a flashing star that wasn't in my older image!

Cartes du Ciel, the planetarium software I use, didn't show an asteroid overlaid on NGC 5033, so I was fairly certain I had just found a supernova. A quick Ctrl+F on the Rochester Astronomy website showed that, indeed, a supernova in NGC 5033 was found by ATLAS on June 3rd, a mere 9 days earlier!

I checked my notebook and saw that I had targeted NGC 5033 as recently as June 6th. I brought up my images from that night and the supernova was visible in them, too! I must have dismissed the supernova as being that small bright patch that's always there. Flipping a couple pages back in my notebook, I saw that I had previously shot NGC 5033 on May 31st (June 1st, Universal Time). But when I blinked those images with last night's, there was no supernova seen on the May 31st images.

Wow! Using my own images taken just 12 days apart, I had found a supernova!

Of course, the supernova isn't something that occurred just 9 days ago. The galaxy is about 53 million light years away. So even when I bring up my very first image of NGC 5033, taken on April 29, 2016, I know that the light of this supernova was on its way, but it just hadn't reached earth yet. The same thing can be said about each of the dozens of images I've taken of NGC 5033 over the past 9 years: the light of a supernova that happened 53 million years ago just hadn't reached me yet!

That's what I find so fascinating about being a supernova hunter. I can regard the date of my first galaxy images as the day that I opened a window to look out into the universe. And not just looking out into the universe but looking back in time. Millions of years back in time. Each of my 25 supernova discoveries marks a specific period of time, maybe 6 months to a year, when a star ended its life in a spectacular explosion, allowing it to be seen briefly across the vast distance of space. To know that I got to see the event, firsthand, as if I had opened my personal window just in the nick of time, is what thrills me. I didn't read about the supernova in the news prior to spotting it. Nobody told me where to look. I searched for it myself and found it with my own telescope, camera, and reference images. It's an amazing feeling. After 25 discoveries, each one still feels like the first.


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