#JWST is often cited for its amazing work with galaxies, BUT LOOK AT IT DISSECTING UP THE CRAB NEBULA AND SHOWING US STAR GUTS FROM A 1000-YEAR OLD STELLAR DETONATION.
Wow! Look at the pulsar!
So epic that we can see this detail, the different structures, elements, velocities, energies, etc. from an event that Chinese and Japanese astronomers witnessed and documented 1000 years back.
We're connected through time with this event to them!
Got another 1.5 hours of light last night from nearby(ish) galaxy NGC 3621 which features the recent supernova #SN2024ggi
Have now been grabbing light from this event over a few months and can see its colour/flux temporal evolution.
Caught it with VIVID’s extreme light pollution too! (VIVID is a very popular festival of light here in Sydney in which light pollution increases by several orders of magnitude!)
Picture of the day: This wild-looking supernova remnant is nicknamed the Jellyfish Nebula. Supernovas produce some of the strangest objects in the night sky.
And I just happened to catch it from my city light-polluted backyard, using a 5cm aperture SeestarS50!
Check it out ... on the left is my image (only 25 mins of data). The cross hairs indicate a 'new star' appearing in galaxy NGC 3621. The right image is from Stellarium and I have annotated where the new star appears, and how it was not there before.
This is a type II supernova, so a massive star's core collapsed and triggered off an extremely violent explosion that we are seeing 22 million years later.
It likely formed a neutron star or pulsar!
It is incredibly bright and I encourage everyone to turn their telescopes towards it and get data / light curves!
Astrophotographers/astronomers with 'scopes capable of low-res spectrography:
Turn your telescopes to NGC 3621, a field galaxy only 7 MPC away! Supernova alert issued with progenitor data available. ⭐💥
NGC 3621 (aka the Frame Galaxy or Southern Cross Galaxy) is fairly bright and if you are around the same latitude as Sydney (many southern cities) it gets very near zenith around 9 - 10pm local time, so an easy and bright target.
The supernova, known as SN 1987A, occurred 160 000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud. #SN1987A was a type II supernova that was observed on Earth in 1987, the first supernova that was visible to the naked eye since 1604 — before the advent of telescopes.
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