Nova Hunters (2006)

skyandtelescope.com

4 pointswglb2 comments

Well! As it happens, around the time of this article I was working as a summer research student in Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, carrying out a search for supernovae as part of Saul Perlmutter's Supernova Cosmology group.

When astrophysicists work on this activity, they use (no surprise) computer vision. The lab's software automated the process these nova hunters ran manually: we subtracted two images of every segment of the night sky taken on different dates to see if any new bright objects appeared in the difference. If so, it's possibly a supernovae!

Because there are so many stars out there you can use this method to predictably discover large numbers of supernovae when you need to study them. They called the project the Nearby Supernova Factory ( https://snfactory.lbl.gov/ ); as far as I know this is still the preferred method.

Very cool.

I once attended a session at the Dayton Hamvention (TAPR group) that did a presentation on amateur nova finders. This must have been 20 years ago--I can't find any reference to it. But in any case, this group discovered some large number of novas.

But this sounds like a serious improvement in the methods.

Incidentally, your link doesn't come up right--it should be https://snfactory.lbl.gov/

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