Capturing a Supernova in my Backyard

There's a reason why my telescopes and cameras get little use from November through April here in Michigan; our entire winter season can be brutal with constant clouds and moment's notice lake-effect snow. March 28th, 2023, would be the first clear night since the start of the year. Not only that, but it was also a new moon - a near-perfect scenario for astrophotography.

Winter is galaxy season in the northern hemisphere for astrophotographers. My aim for this night was to capture more images of the Pinwheel Galaxy to add to the data I had captured over a year prior. Since I have a monochrome camera attached to my telescope, I take through various color filters and combine the images later into a single, color-accurate master.

Above is an LRGB image of the Pinwheel Galaxy, taken on March 28th - in total, this is around five hours' worth of images from that night. Ideally, I'd like around ten to twenty hours of images for a given target. So, while I liked this image, just another night would make it significantly better.

My next clear night to recapture the Pinwheel Galaxy would be May 18th. Rain clouds rolled in after setting up, so I put the telescope away empty-handed. Four days later, waiting in an airport, I saw a headline from NASA that caught my eye: "Supernova Discovered in Nearby Spiral Galaxy M101". Messier 101 is the Pinwheel Galaxy - I missed discovering a supernova by just a hair's breadth.

I had no idea whether I would have been able to identify a supernova, but I got a chance to image again on June 4th and could find out. Between the smoke from the wildfires, I captured a single two-minute exposure of the Pinwheel Galaxy. And the supernova stood out like a sore thumb to my eyes.

Below is a GIF alternating between one image from March and the other from June - the supernova is at the galaxy's one to two o'clock location.