Sunday, 14 October 2012

Can the supernova remnant SN 1572 be observed by amateur astronomers?

As you say, SN 1572 is not very bright in the optical. There are some Hα regions that have been observed with world-class optical telescopes, but they do not look like the X-ray and infrared images that you normally see. In fact, images from the Palomar Optical Sky Survey 2 (with a limiting magnitude of ~22) do not reveal any nebular emission from this object at all:



POSS2 of SN 1572



Therefore, the optical emission must be fainter than 22nd magnitude. I do not think there are amateur photographs of an object this faint and I believe a CCD on an amateur telescope would saturate from noise before revealing any of the nebular emission.

No comments:

Post a Comment