Brighter Than a Billion Suns

Source: Sky and Telescope Credit: Purnendu Gupta

What kind of “explosion” lasts for months and outshines a billion suns? If you haven’t guessed it, it’s the average garden variety supernova. 

Above is my first supernova image captured from my backyard on the night of May 11-12, 2022. Known as SN2022hrs, it shows up here as a white dot between two galaxies - the elliptical Messier 60 and smaller spiral NGC4647. This light from sixty three million light years away, is also sixty three million years old. Breaking news from a time when dinosaurs had just vanished from the earth.

Copernicus and Co.

Craters at lunar terminator © 2020 Purnendu Gupta

The moon's craters, seen in the lunar twilight zone. At the lunar terminator,  fading sunlight meets near perfect darkness of an airless lunar night disturbed only by the faint glow of earthshine. The grazing rays cast long shadows into the crater pits as the edge of light creeps up the shallow slopes to the rims on the far side. 

On the 3rd of December 2020, this was among the first results from my attempt at high magnification video based lunar imaging.