Last Sunday night, I had the first clear, moonless night after weeks of cloud at my location in the southern suburbs of Sydney. I managed to capture a sequence of images of SN2012fr using my Televue 5 inch refractor and a luminosity filter. The unprocessed image at right suggests the supernova was brighter than the host galaxy on Sunday night (11th November 2012). My hunch is that the supernova must have been an easy visual target using a quality 85 mm refractor. This is because I have no trouble seeing NGC 1365 using my Televue 85 mm refractor at a reasonably dark sky location (obviously not the inner suburbs of Sydney).
SN2012fr in NGC 1365:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mlparkinson/8191102271/