JEL: Yep, that's the one.
I saw it again last night
(01/05/11) and here's my report:
I waited for it to get dark, and at about 22:30, I started my search to find it again. It was easy to find the bright star Phad (my scope was pointing straight up - the supernova actually crossed the point right above my head during the night, putting it in the perfect place to observe it) and then hop to the bright galaxies NGC 3998 and NGC 3982, and finally find the faint smudge of the host galaxy NGC 3972. The conditions were better tonight, and I could also see NGC 3990 - the companion to 3998, and I sometimes glimpsed the very faint NGC 3977 just under the supernova's host galaxy.
Once I found the galaxy, I could easily see the supernova in its outskirts - just like another star in the sky. It would be impossible to tell it apart from one of the much closer foreground stars if it wasn't for the star maps.
I waited until about 22:55 to take a guess at its brightness, just to make sure it was properly dark. There is a mag. 13.5 star just next to the galaxy (see map in original post) and I looked for a couple of minutes, and it looked pretty much the same, so my guess for the 1st May 2011 at 22:55 BST is 13.5, +/- 0.1 magnitudes. After writing down the time, estimated brightness and comparison stars, I took the time to admire it.
This is one of those things that reminds me just how incomprehensibly powerful the universe we live in is - my mind just can't grasp how powerful and distant that single point of light is - I have to keep reminding myself what I'm seeing - a single star visible among hundreds of billions in a very distant galaxy - one star, shining proudly from tens of millions of lightyears distant, when the combined effort one hundred billion others creates nothing but a faint smudge of light in the black of space. The fact that we are able to see this powerful beacon from such a distance makes me wonder who else has seen it. Did the inhabitants of NGC 3972 see their skies transformed by the presence of a 'second Sun'? Have any of the other surrounding galaxies visible to the edge of the field of view seen and catalogued it? If they did, then it will most likely have been lost in time, as it will have happened millions of years ago for them. And so the speculation continues...
The recent weather made the nights perfect for observing this supernova, and it hasn't disappointed so far! Here's a graph of its brightness from the last 10 days, made using the observations of amateur astronomers, collated by the
AAVSO. If you see the SN yourself, then it's worth sending in your observations to the AAVSO. They are one of the most popular variable star bodies in the world, where amateurs submit their brightness estimates of variable stars and supernovae to an international database. This data is genuinely valuable for scientists because professional astronomers don't have time to continuously monitor variable stars, so if they ever need any data on their behaviour, then they access the databases maintained by organisations like the AAVSO. They also regularly send observing requests for the amateurs to fulfill. Anyway, here's the graph plotted by the AAVSO database (my points are marked by the blue crosses):
http://www.aavso.org/lcg/plot?auid=...width=600&height=450&mag1=&mag2=&mean=&vmean=
Happy observing!