Dave Grennan - another explosive discovery!

Congratulations, Super stuff, your article is a very entertaining read.

Thanks
Brendan

Congratulations Dave, wonderful achievement. :rock:

My sincere apologies to Isaac Ward...

This in from Terry Moseley:

The first supernova discovery from Ireland was by Belfast amateur Isaac Ward, in 1885: that one was in M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. See: adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1985IrAJ...17...98B and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_Andromedae and www.culturenorthernireland.org/article.aspx?art_id=643
So this is the third supernova to have been discovered from Ireland. The second was also discovered by Dave Grennan in 2010 - and once again his discovery required lots of patience and some highly specialised equipment.… Read more at:
www.independent.ie/breaking-news/nationa...pernova-3213998.html

I should have qualified 'Ireland' as the 'Republic of Ireland' :blush:

I think also that Eamonn Ansbro discovered a Nova from Ireland some years back too. Eamonn?

At this stage, I think someone should list out all the discoveries and astronomy 'firsts' from the island of Ireland - I'm sure there would be many.


We did try some years back to get a program going but I think the biggest hurdle is having the time to do this work and having the speedy response. That takes a lot of committment, resources and time. Something that amateurs typicall do not have becasue they have 'a day job'. For example, and I'm sure Dave G will attest to this, if Dave simply posted his images to a group and then relied on someone to pick them up and blink them, there would be a good chance that the delay would mean someone else around the planet somewhere would place the discovery notice first simply becasue they would be quicker.

I believe however that there is another process which *could* work. If each person was responsible for their imaging and blinking, a group could still be formed that would take a portion of the galaxy database and go ahead and do the survey. Of course, committment is required - there's little point in e.g. just Dave Grennan imaging his portion of the sky whilst the rest of the group are watching Champions League...

If anybody here was interested in talking about the possibilities of forming some kind of supernova search program, let us know.

Dave

p.s. the BBC interview was excellent Dave - well done!

Dave

You're right, I discovered the only Nova from Ireland many years ago. It was photographically detected when carrying ouy variable star observations. Dunsink Observatory (Dublin) confirmed the discovery.

"At this stage, I think someone should list out all the discoveries and astronomy 'firsts' from the island of Ireland - I'm sure there would be many."
I know there has been many discoveries and astronomy firsts from Ireland over two centuries. I have never seen a list yet. This would be a worthwhile endeavour for all of us to know.

I agree that the logistics of carrying out supernova hunting as a group is down to cohesiveness and reliability. I know other amateur international teams have a proven process that works. The Pucket team in the USA comes to mind. May be follow the structure that works for others. As Dave Mc as said, its all down to who is interested in talking about the possibilities of forming a supernova search program.

Eamonn

Eamonn

Thanks everyone for the kind comments. All very much appreciated.

As you know. I share DaveMc and Eamonn's thoughts regarding collaborative astronomy. There are lots of people out there with telescopes and CCDs and there is absolutely no reason why these good folk could not participate in something like this. As Eamonn mentioned there are a number of similar ventures around the world which have been very successful Some are 'open source' ie everyone is welcome. Others are closed shop. I don't like that last idea.

Dave Mc is spot on regarding the issue of timing. Personally I could not run the risk of relying on the goodwill of others to check images just in case a delay ensued. The way other collaborations do this is by sharing a list of targets which participants pick from. There needs to be a framework in place to ensure that participants dont duplicate work etc. The good news is I've done a lot of the work already. Probably the biggest single thing I've done to my own survey since the first discovery is significantly re-write a suite of software which manages all of this for me. The software allocates targets helps capture the images, does all the administrative stuff like recording results, even interfaces with maxim dl to download reference images for the targets and blinks them automatically. This results in a huge saving in time compared to a situation where you were trying to do all this manually. All along I kept such a collaborative effort in mind while writing the software so it wouldn't be too much work to move this into a framework others could use.

Another aspect of the software is choosing suitable targets, By carefully choosing the targets you can stack the odds of success in your favour a little, the software does this.

Of course the more targets you can cover in a given session increases your chance of success. That goes without saying, however even modest setups could capture a few targets and well, you never know when you might just hit on the lucky one. I'm more than happy to work with anyone who is prepared to put some effort behind this. I wont kid you, its a lot of work, but I suppose at least I can say now that it works and if you do put in that effort then you almost certainly will succeed sooner or later.

Congratulations Dave on your second Supernova,Keep up the good work.