SUPERNOVA SN 2009fj  in NGC 7479

Remarkable discovery made during the first AWB's Virtual Telescope Tour
(26.10.2009 text & pictures posted by Julio Vannini / ANASA-Nicaragua to AWB Diskussion GoogleGroups )

One of the photographed object was NGC 7479, a spiral galaxy with a bar of stars, dust and gas, most notably in its center.  There were several shots with varying exposure time, from seconds to several minutes. Once the meeting, Dr. Masi and his team set out to make a basic processing images and something appeared in them: in one part of that arm of galaxy a milky patch came into view. Masi made a comparison with a reference image of the Palomar Observatory and in fact, that "stain" was not there. However, Gianluca thought that possibly it was a failure of the CCD or perhaps just a cloud that had settled on the observation area, which in reality would be nothing unusual since at this time, the clouds begin to appear everywhere.

To the surprise and pain for Gianluca, friends and colleagues of the Observatory in AWB, a day after another observatory that had been taking photos of the same galaxy, reported the discovery of a Supernova! This was classified as SN 2009fj.

Here you can read the original Blog of Julio Vannini: http://tinyurl.com/yfnj7dm

Dr. Gianluca Masi, 25.09.2009

 Screenshot of our chat:
It should be a joke when I asked during this session for making a discovery - LIVE ......

............ but Gianluca did it really make happen  :-)

imaging NGC7479

SN 2009fj one month later.

Final the following original words by Gianluca posted to the Google-AWB-Discussion-Group:

" As for the supernova, it was a truly unique experience for me. There is a nice detail I find important: I did check the image against a reference one the very next morning and I did notice a source on our (I love saying our, as we did the image together!) image. I did check the Palomar Sky Survey and, incredibly, there was something (!) at the same
location! This is why I thought it was just the same object (possibly a HII region in that galaxy), with the marginal differences due to the different spectral sensitivity between our detector (CCD) and the photographic plates used at Palomar. The official discoverers of the supernova observed more than 24 hours later and to them the star was significantly brigther, (the star was rapidly raising) that making easier to distinguish the new object from the structure on the same position.

So, while I did check the image carefully, there was a old structure on the same position as tyhe SN! Too bad, but still we grabbed this dying star in a very early (and rarely observed, being completly unpredictable) stage and this made me less disappointed :) "
 

Johannes Stübler LAG/Austria