This exciting — at least to astronomers — event happened in a relatively nearby galaxy with the designation M101. M101 is visible from dark, non-light-poluted skies in a small telescope as a small fuzzy patch in the sky above the handle of the Big Dipper. The first picture attached (Series122) shows it as I was able to photograph it on the night of June 16, 2012. You can see the many spiral arms leading out from the bright core of the galaxy. Billions of stars blend together to make the light that we see in this spiral pattern. Most of the individual stars that you see in this picture are forground stars in our own Milky Way galaxy that we have to look past in order to see M101 22 million light years distant. That is about 200 times the diameter of our Milky Way, so if you imagine the Milky Way as the size of a standard CD or DVD, M101 would be the size of a salad plate 75 feet away.

But what makes this galaxy especially interesting is that on August 24, 2011, Palomar Observatory in Southern California discovered a star in this galaxy blowing itself up in a massive thermonuclear explosion — something called a Type 1a supernova. A supernova is what occurs when a star destructively blows up much like trillions of hydrogen bombs going off all at once. Over a period of a few days this star increased it’s luminosity to 5 billion times that of the Sun. On August 23 it was not visible. On August 24 it was first discovered. On August 27 my childhood friend, Dr. Fritz Kleinhans, a professional physicist and astronomer, emailed me at L.O., and I was able to get photographs on August27, 28, and 30. It was rapidly brightening then, and it continued to brighten until mid-September. Since then it has been fading so that it is now visible only in a fairly large telescope. The second photograph attached (Series87) shows the supernova as it was on August 28. I have put a blue circle around the star. You can see that it was already brighter than most of the foreground stars that are thousands of times closer, being nearby in our own galaxy. If you check back to the first photograph, taken just a few weeks ago, you will see that the supernova has by now faded to just a faint blue star. If you enlarge both pictures and can look at them side-by-side, it is easy to see the change. (There are some tiny red streaks in the second photo. They are defects. Ignore them.)

This is the brightest supernova that has been seen in over 20 years, and it is one of the earliest ever discoveries in the cycle of a supernova. It was first detected just about 11 hours after it first exploded! This type of supernova can be used by astronomers as a “standard candle” to judge how far away it is based on its brightness, thus helping to determine more accurately the size of the universe. By the way, this was the very first astronomically significant event to be observed at Lookout Observatory, and you have now shared in it. I hope you enjoyed it.

As always, if you don’t have an interest in this sort of thing, please reply to this email and let me know to remove you from this list. No hard feelings. There is too much email going around, and we all need to be selective. On the other hand, if you know people who would like to be added to this distribution list, they can email me and ask to be added.

Keep looking up,

Carter Mehl,

(sometime) Resident Astronomer,

Lookout Observatory