SN 2014J

Supernova in M82: SN 2014J It's a quite important supernova, as it could shed light on some issues that these cosmic standard candles have. Too bad it has a lot of dust reddening, which complicates matters a lot.

    Having a look a the AAVSO light curves, I'd say that it won't be brighter than 9.5m at maximum, but let's see!

    Here's the image taken with our 0.5m rooftop telescope in Bonn, at the Argelander Institute for Astronomy:

Technical details here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27891676@N05/12165418933/

SN 2013EV

A very faint supernova in a galaxy that we've all seen so many times: IC 1296. Not a very impressive galaxy, but got it's fame for being very close (4 arcminutes) to a night sky celebrity: M 57, the Ring Nebula. While IC 1296 lies at a distance of about 221 million light years, the nearby Ring is only 2300 light years away.

   An image I took about a week ago:

Larger versions on Flickr.

Crab nebula and polarized light

      Besides wavelength (color), photons have other properties too: if seen as a wave their electric field oscillates in a plane which can remain fixed or rotate in time and by convention we describe this polarization state by specifying the orientation of the electric field over one oscillation.

      Polarimetry is a very useful tool for determining what kind of physical processes are at work in the light source (especially for synchrotron radiation) and the distribution of magnetic fields in it: there is much more to light than just color!

     Polarimetry color information superimposed on a "normal" photograph of Crab nebula creates the unusual picture below. The red color in the nebula comes from an arbitrary initial polarisation angle (we weren't able to find out yet the true polarizing angle), the green shows 45 degrees more and the blue is with the filter rotated by 90 degrees compared to the original position.

Earth Science Picture of the Day for June 24th 2012. 

The image has been made by me (color and luminance data) and David Muelheims (polarized data), in Bonn, Germany.

        And although "popular wisdom" might tell you that the human eye cannot distinguish between polarization states, it's not really true, as Haidinger found out many, many years ago :)

M 95 supernova

...and we have another bright supernova! Colloquially called PSN J10435372+1140177, this time it is in M 95, a barred - spiral - ring galaxy in Leo and it's brightening fast. We don't know yet what kind of supernova is it, but more observations will let us know soon :)

Let's also wait for the IAU to officially annnounce it, it has been discovered or a few days already by the Italian Supernovae Search Project.

Images taken together with Dominik Klaes, Daniel Lenz and Katharina Sendlinger.