Supernova SN 2011fe Still Alive and Kicking

[Drakkith]

Just got this shot this morning and that baby's still brighter than many of the foreground stars even after 3 months.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_2011fe

http://img804.imageshack.us/img804/8462/m101sn.jpg

 

[davenn]

just got this shot ?
if it one you did ? if so well done :)

i haven't spied a SN for a few years now

unfortunately that one is too far north for me to see


Dave

 

[Drakkith]

Yep, it's mine. First time I've ever seen a Supernova myself!

 

[davenn]

Outstanding ! :)

what did you use to get the image ?
what scope, camera, exposure time etc etc ??

I have seen only 4 SN's only one naked eye one. 1987A in the SMC close to the Tarantula Nebula. It was naked eye for ~ 2 months. that was so cool ! They say there's roughly 300 years between naked eye SN's

There's a well known amateur astronomer guy that lives ~ 50 km from my home, here in Sydney Australia, Robert (Bob) Evans who has the record for the most visually discovered super novae 42 !

An astounding achievement

cheers
Dave

 

[Drakkith]

10" Meade SN telescope that came with my LXD75 mount. (I use an Atlas EQ-G mount now. The LXD 75 isn't made well enough for imaging work really)
SBIG ST-2000XM CCD camera binned 2x2
3x300s exposures through each RGB. Total time was 45 minutes.
At the time the galaxy was maybe halfway up into the sky and I was looking into the light dome of Shreveport and Bossier City.
No flats or darks were subtracted lol. Just a noise filter and some minor processing.

 

[davenn]

A nice setup.
The SBIG imagers have been quite popular... gosh, I remember when they first hit the market... They have done quite a bit of evolving huh :)
I haven't played with image stacking, tho my mate back in NZ does so quite a bit

Before I left New Zealand to come to Australia, I had a Meade DS10 10" F4.5 It was a "lightbucket" on a Dobo. Most of my early photography was with an 8" Edmund Scientific f5 that took that pic in the other topic on colour of objects. That scope was owned by a good mate and the 2 of us woould spend hours outside on cold winter nights photographing all sorts of objects.
for the long exposures ... greater than 10-15 mins we would share the tracking time at the eyepiece to give each other a break before we became human popiscles in the cold haha.

I will dig up my SN1987A pics and scan or photo them to put on here.
Over the last 10 odd yrs, the main astro photos I have taken have mainly been eclipses of the moon or sun or comets.
Speaking of which we are planning a trip to NE Australia November next year for a total solar eclipse 14th Nov 2012 the path crosses the Queensland coast between Cairns and Port Douglas.

I do have a scope here, sadly in sky bright city like Sydney it doesn't get much use.
its an 8" f4.5 Dobo.

cheers
Dave

 

[Drakkith]

Wow, manual guiding...no thanks lol. I'm still pretty new at astrophotography, only been doing it for about 6 months or so. And only about 3 months with my SBIG camera. It's been rough learning the ropes of all this and dealing with issues that pop up. Took me over a month after I got my SBIG camera to realize I was having problems with frost building up on the camera window. I'm in the middle of a city myself, so I usually go about 20-30 minutes to the local "observatory" if you can call it that. It's still in a fairly light polluted area though.

 

[davenn]

Wow, manual guiding...no thanks lol.

hahhaha yup, them were the days. You would have an optical off-axis guider mounted between the eyepiece holder of the scope and the camera adaptor tube. Then you would rotate the off-axis guider around till you could find a bright enough star to use as a guide star.

You mentioned Shreveport, Louisiana I assume ? been a while since I have been through there ... May 2006 during our stormchasing around the mid-west :)
Another one of my wife and my crazy interersts haha

Dave

 

[Astronuc]

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-closest-ia-supernova-decades-cosmic.html

Closest Type Ia supernova in decades solves a cosmic mystery

It's an interesting story:

. . . .

While these observations pointed to a "normal" SN Ia, the way the white dwarf exploded held surprises. Typical of what would be expected, early spectra obtained by the Lick three-meter telescope showed many intermediate-mass elements spewing out of the expanding fireball, including ionized oxygen, magnesium, silicon, calcium, and iron, traveling 16,000 kilometers a second – more than five percent of the speed of light. Yet some oxygen was traveling much faster, at over 20,000 kilometers a second.

"The high-velocity oxygen shows that the oxygen wasn't evenly distributed when the white dwarf blew up," Nugent says, "indicating unusual clumpiness in the way it was dispersed." But more interesting, he says, is that "whatever the mechanism of the explosion, it showed a tremendous amount of mixing, with some radioactive nickel mixed all the way to the photosphere. So the brightness followed the expanding surface almost exactly. This is not something any of us would have expected."

. . . .

 

[e.bar.goum]

Wow, that's great! I'm too far south to see it, I was a bit crushed at that.

 

[Drakkith]

Wow, that's cool Astronuc! Thanks for sharing!