Congratulations to Brendan Downs of Thunderchild Observatory on his discovery of a magnitude 17.3 Supernova in IC4854 in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Catalogued as 2010dc, this is Brendan's 2nd Supernova after a long drought. As I have noted before it doesn't surprise me that he has another and I predict there will be many more, much quicker. He now has the equipment, but more importantly he has the passion and support to be even more successful.
Three cheers Brendan, the monopoly has been broken, for now.... (hehe).
I must thank Peter Marples, Greg Bock, Colin Drescher, Pat Pearl, Stu Parker (members of BOSS, Backyard Observatory Supernova Search team) and Berto Monard for help with confirming the discovery and doing all the reporting.
The image shows IC 4854 and the supernova 2010dc.
The image was taken with a very new 14inch Meade ACF OTA (4 months old), and very old ST-7 (15 years old) and was 60 seconds exposure time.
It has been nearly 13 years since my first supernova, 1997de at the Qld astrofest. It means I get to bore friends with a new story.
And yes I will be bringing a white pen to the astrofest to updated the score sheet.
Last edited by thunderchildobs; 25-05-2010 at 06:53 PM.
Congrats! Terrific how you guys pick up those tiny specks.
I downloaded images of the 6000 galaxies in my search from the Digitized Sky Survey (DSS) (9gig of data at dial up, took 3 weeks).
When I take an image, I visual compare it to the DSS image and to a existing image I have. I know others who blink compare their images.
Remember you do not have to check the entire field, but only the region around the galaxy. (But I do look for any stray fuzziness just in case there is comet passing through). In this case the supernova stood out like a sore thumb. (How a mag 17.2 star stands out is an interesting concept). I probably noticed the supernova in under 10 seconds.
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