Supernova 2011DH

[jhphotoguy]

At the end of May a type II supernova appeared in the Whirlpool Galaxy (Messier 51) at a distance of around 35 million light years. I was out photographing this galaxy on the night of June 1, 2011 and managed to capture the supernova although I did not realize it at the time. Only after seeing it in the news a day later did I realize I had gotten it. Here's some shots from the night of June 1st. Converted to jpeg from the original TIFF files stacked by DeepSkyStacker. I've done some minimal processing in photoshop CS3 and need to find the time to sit down and really do some work on it, but I was quite surprised at my results for the minimal amount of work I put into it.

Supernova is in the red circle.

These are about 30 minutes or so of 1 & 2 minute subs taken at ISO1000. The sky was not the best so this was more or less just a testing of my mount & camera.

A few days later I managed to get a lot more data and put together this one of about an hour and twenty minutes of data in 2-3 minute subframes at ISO 1000. I'm hoping to get out to darker skies this weekend and spend several hours on this before it's gone so I will be shooting at a much lower ISO and using longer exposures (aiming for between 5-10 min exposures).

 

[spacefuzz]

sweet capture! The universe is so beautiful.

 

[reedshots]

What was the set up?

 

[jhphotoguy]

My setup is a Vixen ED80Sf 80mm refractor mounted on an Orion Atlas EQ-G mount, autoguiding by an LVI II camera on a 50mm guidescope, Canon 50D DSLR (unmodded), used the Canon capture software on a Panasonic CF-29 Toughbook. I was in the process of upgrading to a 127mm refractor, however that has been put on the back burner until I can pay for my new camera and school.

 

[Trever1t]

wow, nice gear!

 

[jhphotoguy]

Thanks, managed to get some more pics of this supernova so will post when I am done with the processing. Also just picked up Adobe Lightroom 3 so having quite a bit of fun processing in that as well. Batch-processing all my subs before stacking is yielding some interesting results.