Last week a group of students from London discoverd a Supernova in the nearby galaxy M82 (in this case, nearby means 12 million lightyears…)

Professional search programs missed the supernova as the automatic detection programs ruled it out because it was too bright. M82 is part of the bright M81 & M82 galaxy pair.

Today I had the chance to take a picture of it:

click on the image to get a bigger version, here is an annotated view of the two galaxies:

Astro-Professional 80mm ED refractor, TS Flattener, Nikon D7000 camera, QHY5 autoguider, Super Polaris mount. Exposure was 30x30s at f/7