One hell of a bang!

Taken from our backyard at 11.20pm on the 9th March 2014.
9 x 30 sec lights, 3 darks and 3 flats at ISO 1600, stacked using
 DeepSkyStacker and finished using APS.
127mm  Meade Apo and Canon 600d DSLR .
 NEQ6 mount unguided

In a fit of desperation and  fighting off the light pollution, moonlight and aching fractured ribs, I ventured out to try and see and if possible image the supernova in the relatively nearby galaxy Messier 82.

Messier 82 or NGC 3034 and sometimes referred to as the Cigar Galaxy is some 11.5 million light years distant.  A very very long way away but in the context of the distribution of galaxies in the Universe a close neighbour of our own galaxy the Milky Way.

M82 is presented to us almost edge on, hence the cigar shape but has been determined to have two spiral arms which are largely obscured by a complex of dusty filaments. New stars in this galaxy are being created at a prodigious rate, almost ten times faster than in our own galaxy and because of this it is labeled as a 'starburst galaxy'. This star birth activity and the deformation of M82 is caused by the gravitational tidal forces acting as the result of its proximity to the much larger galaxy M81.

Messier 82 as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope
taken in 2006

In January of this year, Dr Steve Fossey and undergraduate students at the Mill Hill Observatory of University College London discovered a Supernova in M82

See:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/maps-faculty/maps-news-publication/maps1405

This supernova is considered to be a Type 1A supernova.

A type 1A supernova occurs when a white dwarf star, part of a binary star system, is completely destroyed in a massive nuclear detonation.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_Ia

Montage of my own images
showing the location of the Supernova

The size of this detonation and explosion is almost unimaginable. The remoteness of this star is also difficult to grasp. 11.5 million light years is a very long way.

 67,604,193,724,356,720,000 miles! 

or

108798403545131160000 Kilometres

So when we look through a telescope and it appears as bright as some relatively nearby stars in our galaxy, we know that it represents an enormous release of energy. The intensity of the burst has peaked and is now in decline. Interestingly, the explosion occurred some 11.5 million years ago and the light from it has spent all this time traversing the vast distance between M82 and the Milky Way.  The photons I collected in my camera started off  7 million years before we emerged as a species. The Universe really rocks!

Enlargement of my image showing the foreground stars in the Milky Way and M82 with the Supernova far away in the distance

Using the known visual magnitudes of the foreground stars (Hubble catalogue) I estimate the visual magnitude on the 9th March 2014 to be approximately 11.8.  Using a web based  calculator to convert visual magnitude to absolute magnitude (visual magnitude if the Supernova was only 10 parsecs or 32.6 light years distant) we can calculate that SN 2014J has an absolute magnitude of -15.936 or put another way that its luminance is currently 203 million times that of our Sun. Your Ray Bans would struggle with reducing the glare if you were anywhere nearby.

The brightest star in our sky is Sirius, in winter in the UK you can see it shining brightly, below and to the left of the constellation Orion.  Sirius is 9 light years distant. If the Supernova had occurred at that distance from Earth it would have had a visual magnitude of -18.7 , a point source of light with an apparent luminosity somewhere between the brightness of the Moon and the Sun.

Star map showing position in the night sky of M81 and M82 near the Plough asterism

Credits:  UCL/University of London, Hubble Space Telescope and SkyMap Pro