New Supernova

[Graeme]

A new supernova was discovered in spiral galaxy Messier 101 yesterday in Ursa Major.

https://twitter.com/ChasinSpin/status/1 ... 3170705410

I'm planning on having a go at capturing an image of it tonight.

Regards

Graeme

[HansV]

The supernova is expected to peak at magnitude 15 - that requires a dark sky!

[Graeme]

And:

https://twitter.com/d_a_howell/status/1 ... 3080322048

[Graeme]

The supernova is expected to peak at magnitude 15 - that requires a dark sky!

I expect the JWST is slewing as we speak!

[HansV]

No doubt! It's just the ticket for that telescope.

[Graeme]

Can't get the guide camera to focus so I'm limited to 60 second exposures.

Here's an unprocessed one.

M101.jpg

[ChrisGreaves]

Can't get the guide camera to focus so I'm limited to 60 second exposures

M101.jpg

Hello Graeme,
These wisoy light-brown bits, dead centre of your posted image, are these the spiral arms of a galaxy?
(Rough Translaation: :amazed: Your equipment picks up that much detail, at that distance?")
Thanks, Chris

[HansV]

Well done, but which star is the supernova?

[Graeme]

Well done, but which star is the supernova?

This one:

M101 Supernova_EL.jpg

So the faint thing in the centre is the galaxy M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy with a bright core and all the other dots are Milky Way stars in the foreground. Except for the supernova, which is clearly the brightest object in M101 at the moment! It's also brighter than a lot of the distant Milky Way stars and it's 21 million light years away!

Graeme

[Graeme]

These wisoy light-brown bits, dead centre of your posted image, are these the spiral arms of a galaxy?
(Rough Translaation: :amazed: Your equipment picks up that much detail, at that distance?")
Thanks, Chris

Yes they are but they're wispy because of the 60 second exposure problem. They would have been a lot brighter if the guiding had worked and I had captured 5 minute exposures and then the spiral arms would have had some colour and more definition.

[HansV]

Thanks, Graeme!

[ChrisGreaves]

Well done, but which star is the supernova?

This one:

And before Hans asks which one is the superstar, let me try my hand at answering: Graeme!
Cheers, Chris

[ChrisGreaves]

So the faint thing in the centre is the galaxy M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy with a bright core and all the other dots are Milky Way stars in the foreground. Except for the supernova, which is clearly the brightest object in M101 at the moment! It's also brighter than a lot of the distant Milky Way stars and it's 21 million light years away!

It is difficult for this evolved human brain to accommodate this thought. Our brains must have evolved to think of "those bright lights in the sky", with the central point being a single item identified as "the sky".
That is, the bright lights are "there", where "there" is a single region (a hemisphere of blackness).

In your excellent image, the Galaxy is evident, and rationally (not by evolution) I know it must be a long way away. 21 million light years is a thousand times more than "two hundred thousand light years side to side" (any previous link to Monty Python's "The meaning of Life"). That's about the difference between one step out of my doorway and someone half a mile away - a good 20 minutes walk, I think.

And yet, and yet, the brightest star in your image does NOT belong to all the other stars in your image at all; it belongs to a fuzzy ball/blur in your image, and painfully, it is the only star of that fuzzy blur, that can be seen!
Much to think about.

Your Guiding mechanism: is it broken, malfunctioning, poorly adjusted? What is involved in your fixing it? Return To Stores? Jewelers screwdrivers?
Cheers, Chris

[Graeme]

So the faint thing in the centre is the galaxy M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy with a bright core and all the other dots are Milky Way stars in the foreground. Except for the supernova, which is clearly the brightest object in M101 at the moment! It's also brighter than a lot of the distant Milky Way stars and it's 21 million light years away!

It is difficult for this evolved human brain to accommodate this thought. Our brains must have evolved to think of "those bright lights in the sky", with the central point being a single item identified as "the sky".
That is, the bright lights are "there", where "there" is a single region (a hemisphere of blackness).

Things that make you go wow! And what you describe is as they once thought, the universe was everything you can see and the faint fuzzies were within it. Then Henrietta Swan Leavitt worked out the relationship between the luminosity and the period of Cepheid variables. Then Hubble spotted some in the Andromeda Galaxy and suddenly the universe was much bigger!

In your excellent image, the Galaxy is evident, and rationally (not by evolution) I know it must be a long way away. 21 million light years is a thousand times more than "two hundred thousand light years side to side" (any previous link to Monty Python's "The meaning of Life"). That's about the difference between one step out of my doorway and someone half a mile away - a good 20 minutes walk, I think.

Dunno about excellent! Difficult to imagine the huge voids between galaxies. But the space between stars compared to the size of stars is much larger than the space between galaxies compared to the size of galaxies.

Your Guiding mechanism: is it broken, malfunctioning, poorly adjusted? What is involved in your fixing it? Return To Stores? Jewelers screwdrivers?

I woke up thinking it is either because the guide camera isn't focussed or because I didn't change the focal length setting in the guide software after adding my focal reducer. I hope it's not broken!

Graeme

[ChrisGreaves]

I woke up thinking it is either because the guide camera isn't focused or because I didn't change the focal length setting in the guide software after adding my focal reducer. I hope it's not broken!

Thanks Graeme.
I think of your guiding mechanism as a chunk of hardware & software that locks onto a specific nearby star (or small pattern of stars), and adjusts the telescope's orientation so that the telescope remains pointed at (and hence focused on) a specific region of the sky.
A bit like a servo-motor with a feedback loop?
I would imagine, too, that the guidance device is bolted to the telescope, so that they are moved "as one"?

If that is so, then i trust you take this the right way: The lack of guidance was due to (your) easily-corrected human error rather than an expensive hardware/software faulty.

Now I am going out to wheel barrow more loads of compost, earthbound, while you contemplate a star in a distant galaxy,
Cheers, Chris

[Graeme]

I think of your guiding mechanism as a chunk of hardware & software that locks onto a specific nearby star (or small pattern of stars), and adjusts the telescope's orientation so that the telescope remains pointed at (and hence focused on) a specific region of the sky.

Pretty much! It's a separate camera that is monitored by guiding software that sends pulses to and nudges the telescope mount when the guide star wanders out of view. The guide camera can be in a separate, smaller telescope mounted on the main telescope or an off axis guider that sits to the side of the main camera.

[Graeme]

Today's APOD:

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230522.html


Yesterday's is interesting too.

[ChrisGreaves]

Today's APOD:

Let me be the first to ask a question: Why is this supernova at the seven o'clock position whereas the other supernova was at the four o'clock position.
I already know the answer, as do you all: It is just the way the image is oriented in the two dimensional plane.

But that lets me segue into a more interesting question: Why don't these oh-so-clever astronomers follow a convention for standardized orientation of images, (especially now that we use computers to match images)?

Bonus remark: A serendipitous typo had me almost type "astromishing".
Cheers, Chris

[PJ_in_FL]

Today's APOD:

Let me be the first to ask a question: Why is this supernova at the seven o'clock position whereas the other supernova was at the four o'clock position.
I already know the answer, as do you all: It is just the way the image is oriented in the two dimensional plane.

But that lets me segue into a more interesting question: Why don't these oh-so-clever astronomers follow a convention for standardized orientation of images, (especially now that we use computers to match images)?

Bonus remark: A serendipitous typo had me almost type "astromishing".
Cheers, Chris

Maybe a better question is why the two images have spirals going in opposite directions?

NASA's spiral swirls down the drain (galaxy center) going counter-clockwise.

Your image appears to swirl toward the center in the clockwise direction.

Who's image is reversed, and how would someone really know?

[ChrisGreaves]

NASA's spiral swirls down the drain (galaxy center) going counter-clockwise.

:waving hand in air frantically:

... I know the answer.
You Americans are so proud of being The Only Nation In The World That ... (search for "metric" and 'imperial" anywhere in Eileen's Lounge) that to you guys having the universe go down the drain in the opposite direction just re-affirms your isolation from the rest of the world.

It's like Florida boasting all about its excellent weather and then being fogged/rained/windblown in for a solid, if not liquid, month.

You're welcome!
Cheers, Chris