Crowdsourcing the M51 Supernova (and My Images)

The supernova in M51, Left; The discovery image (from here) on 2 June, Right; Pete Polous’s GRAS-07 image of June 3.

My images of M51. Left image: M51 imaged with GRAS-07 on 04-06-11 at 02:36 UT (300 seconds Luminance). Right image: M51 imaged with GRAS-05 (120 seconds Luminance).

Images optimized (Arcsinx) with FITS liberator, then scaled and despeckled with ImageJ.

The supernova is still, bright, but I’ll have to do some photometry to see if it is fading.

This is an excellent opportunity to use crowd sourcing as a way of following the supernova. I’ve already asked the GRAS users to upload there images to the GRAS users page. However, I’d like everyone with images of M51 from May 28 on to submit them to the Flikr group astrometry, which automatically performs astrometry on the images, and will allow us to follow the supernova.

Read more at Astroblogger