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Alexandru Barbovschi
California, USA
04/16/2021

Equipment Details:

Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer mount + Sky-Watcher Evostar 72ED (72/420mm) + Sky-Watcher generic flattener + Canon 80D (120s, ISO800)

Post-processing Details:

Pre-processed using bias, darks and flats (Siril). Stacked 98 frames (Siril). Initial post-processing in Siril, sent through starfixer and final touches in RawTherapee. Annotation done with astrometry.net and Gimp

Image Details:

SUPERNOVAE IN VIRGO
This time around it was the curfew that blocked me from shooting it myself. So, my partner in crime from California, Tara Mostofi, saved me once again, shooting the target on 16th of April. Supernovae are much more rare than novae and can outshine at their peak an entire galaxy. These events are extremely violent and... useful! The supernovae of class Ia all share the same brightness, which means they can be used as a ruler for the distances in the universe, a property which is impossible to underestimate. The galaxy in which this specific supernovae exploded is known as IC 3322A and is situated in a galaxy-rich region of the night sky - you can see how many of them have been detected by the tool I used for the annotation (though it "skipped" the most interesting one - the galaxy in which SN2021hiz supernovae exploded).

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