Hi all,
Hot off the press for you all, this is as it happened over the last few hours.
Myself and Greg Bock from the BOSS team have discovered a possible supernova in NGC5128, the famous Hamburger galaxy in Centaurus.
The galaxy is 12 million light years away and we estimate mag 14 however it is right next to a brighter star. The possible Supernova could brighten significantly and you are urged to take images if possible. Please see my discovery image, more date to follow. looking forward to color images. we have reported to the IAUs new Transient Name Server (TNS) and await a spectra.
Thanks for looking.
ooh very exciting to have a close amateur galaxy, looks very interesting peter, sorry i am a noob but i have pics of this and the extra bump is not on mine
pat
Great find. If it helps I took a single image of NGC 5128 from 1:37 am to 1:43 am on Saturday 6 February. The image was taken at ISO400 on a Canon 60Da. I've attached a zoomed, cropped jpeg taken from the original RAW file. As you can see, the SN is there. When was your image taken?
Great find. If it helps I took a single image of NGC 5128 from 1:37 am to 1:43 am on Saturday 6 February. The image was taken at ISO400 on a Canon 60Da. I've attached a zoomed, cropped jpeg taken from the original RAW file. As you can see, the SN is there. When was your image taken?
Paul this is very useful! Its the first pre discovey image I am aware of. Our discovery image was taken at 11pm last night. The professionals are going nuts with many emails. Seems we got the magnitude somewhat skewed at 14 and more like mag 15.5 ish and im hoping we can be forgiven for that. Can you send me any fits file you have for this image as this may prove very useful to professional astronomers.
Thanks Peter
Can do Peter - please send me a PM with the details of how to get the a copy of the original RAW image to you and I'll do so tonight as soon as I get home from work.
The pros have some initial photometry and its seems the red magnitude is 14.3 so that's a lot more promising. We have been sent some Hubble Deep field images around the PSN site and there maybe several candidates for the progenitor (star that exploded). We have been inundated with emails from professional astronomers all over the world. Amazing. Yes lots of color images folks. Go back over any recent images as we know its wasn't there on the 3rd February so getting a timeline would be valuable.
Hi Peter
If Melbourne's forecast holds I'll have another go tonight. Does anyone have any thoughts on what exposure lengths will provide the best data? I suspect that 300 seconds would be too long - the length of the single image I got early Saturday morning. I've not 'done' this before - imaging a SN - so any help would be much appreciated.
Paul
Seems there maybe 5 magnitudes of visual extinction here, the object is heavily reddened in some of pros images. Wow just imagine if it wasnt. Should start getting spectra later today will keep you all informed.
Hi all,
Any hi-res images taken over the last 4 weeks or so would be great. We are fairly sure that it wasn't visible on 3 February according to Stu Parker's image (limiting mag <18) and it had appeared by 6 Feb according to Paul's image above. So it appears that it exploded somewhere in between those dates making it about 2 to 5 days old at discovery.
Atel 8655 just released, indicates that spectra taken with the 2.4 m telescope ( LJT + YFOSC) at Lijiang observatory of Yunnan Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The spectrum appears to be heavily reddened, which is consistent with the red photometric color measured in Atel #8654. H-alpha emission line detected, and its classification is consistent with a Type II supernova. However, due to the relatively low SNR of the spectrum (taken at airmass ~2.9) and heavy reddening, regard this classification as tentative in nature.
That's exciting, congratulations on the find! And may have decided my imaging target for tonight, if Sydney's clear as forecast . What's the separation between the PSN and the bright field star in arcsec?
. What's the separation between the PSN and the bright field star in arcsec?
