Hi All,
Some of you will know that the Backyard Observatory Supernova Search group has had great success in the past few months. Working with Peter Marples,Colin Drescher Greg Bock and Pat Pearl has been alot of fun and has produced alot of very useful Scientific results. To have the professional Astronomers follow up on our discoveries is great and very enjoyable. But it is hard work and many 100s hours are involved in just 1 discovery in Imaging, Scanning and reporting. It has been a very long road for me as I have had an interest in Supernova searching for 20 years but only contacting Peter Marples 2years ago and starting my serious search programme in June of this year. So to be able to discover as many as we have is really unreal for me and many thanks has to go to the group Peter and Colin who does the reporting and everybody else involved. We work in very well and all seem to get on so easily I think that this is the main reason for our success.
Make no mistake this part of Amateur Astronomy is extremely competitive and sometimes can bring the worst out in people none of which I have ever found with the Group. I would like to thank them for making me very welcome and really look forward to working with them in the future and especially looking forward to meeting them this weekend when I come over. I would also like to thank Bob Evans for his inspiration in keeping my Interest in Starting a Supernova search programme.
I thought I would make a collage of our discoveries in the past months. I have done one for Peter’s discoveries as well to show you all the different shapes and sizes of the galaxies we observe. I am starting a new Website to be able to post our observations hopefully in the New Year. I hope you enjoy these images as much as we have in discovering these massive explosions of these distant stars.
Stu - that's awesome! You guys work *very* hard to get these results. You deserve much lauding for your hard efforts. Real science being done by amateurs - it's so nice to see.
Keep discovering those SNs.
Dave
edit: do you plan to put up detailed methodologies for SN hunting on your new website?
