Mr. Galaxy's Supernovae

"Ready to move on to the next galaxy?" asked Doug as Wayne stared intently at the monitor.

"Hm," Wayne mumbled not quite ready to move on yet. Obviously, Wayne knew something didn't look quite right.

"What's wrong?" said Doug while taking a closer look at the monitor. "What's that?" he asked noticing a bright spot.

"I'm not sure," said Wayne in a preoccupied tone. That was Wayne Johnson's and Doug Millar's first response to seeing something that was obviously different in a very familiar galaxy.

Earlier that night, Wayne, Doug, and Jim Leonard, all members of the Orange County Astronomers, had been installing Jim's new CCD camera on the club's venerable 22-inch aperture Kuhn telescope at the club's observatory south of Anza, California. It was Friday, April 1st, and all three wanted to take advantage of the good sky conditions while they lasted. Wayne and Doug set about calibrating the focus position for the camera and adjusting the exposure settings on the bright Orion Nebula just after sunset. Jim thought it might be a good idea for him to take a nap to be better able to stay up late and skip all the fiddling with the calibration. Soon images were coming in pretty well and it was time for something new. Doug suggested the Horsehead Nebula in the same area, a notoriously difficult and faint object. After some minutes of trying, a very dim outline was observed. Pretty much in frustration with that image, Doug suggested that they swing over to M51, a much brighter and very interesting galaxy in the constellation of Canes Venatici, just then rising in the Northeast.

By now the Starlight Xpress camera was attached to the 4" f/10 refractor accessory telescope to the Kuhn. They steered to the galaxy and Wayne looked through the 22's eyepiece to center the image and noticed that M51's central region seemed "different".

Doug made a camera exposure, and both saw what was surely something different in a familiar face. A little east and south of the nucleus was a new star. The process was now to assure that it was not an artifact of the camera, or a fly on the mirror, or more likely, a passing satellite, asteroid, or comet. The camera was switched over to the main telescope and focused. Wayne then went to the books to see if this object really was new, or merely a foreground object that had been there all along. Meanwhile, Doug proceeded to take several exposures and apply image contrast enhancement to further clarify what they were looking at. It was soon apparent that the new object was just that. It was just a little dimmer than a nearby star with a known magnitude of 13.5.

Now, had anyone else seen it? Wayne went into high gear on the telephone. The first call was to Palomar Mountain Observatory to have them take a look. "I hope they don't take this to be some April Fool's Day prank," thought Wayne as he picked up the telephone. They were very helpful and indicated that it was a slow night. They had the 60" take an image and the 200" would take an image if anything was seen. A later call from them confirmed that it was a supernova and gave the exact location as 14" east and 12" south of the nucleus of the galaxy. Wayne then called the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams (CBAT) to alert astronomers all over the world that a new supernova had been found. Calls started to come back asking to know more details. In the meantime, Doug went down and woke up Jim to help with the additional imaging needed.

In the days that followed, the supernova was named SN1994I because it was the 9th supernova to be found that year. Although some observers in Georgia had seen it by a half an hour earlier, Wayne, Doug, and Jim had been the first to report it to the world.