Hi All,
Maybe I should have posted this under the resent BOSS discovery of SN2012dj but I wanted to draw attention to an event that happened about 73 million years ago that the telescope/camera caught last week and thought it may be of interest.
I managed to capture a before and after image of the universe in action. Attached is an image showing a type Ib/c supernova developing over the space of only a few days. This happened very fast and if you blink you can miss it!!!!
To see this happen over such a short time is what interested me in the sky and astronomy at such a young age.You don’t really need the HST to see cool stuff. To make things even better the BOSS team were the first in the world to see the photons/light that had travelled for so long to reach my telescope WOW.
Great Stuff Stu,I don't know if that is the first set of images showing a before and after over such a short time, but it is still a spectacular
catch for an amateur astronomer.
Cheers
Hi Lydia and Silv
It is indeed a great capture.
The BOSS team take many thousands of images per month of several hundered target galaxies. Stu doing the bulk of the work with some 3000 images in just a few nights.
The target galaxies are made up largely of spiral galaxies that are typically within about 250million light years. We try to image the script of galaxies regularly with images taken every few days where possible in order to achieve exactly what Stu has done here. This has significant scientific value for professional astronomers who may follow up the supernova. They are keen to know how young the Supernova might be and knowing that it wasn't there (to our magnitude limit) in say the last 7 days is very useful.
So NGC7531 is just one of those many galaxies in our lists that in this case gave very good rewards.