Comments on: Youngest hunter bags a supernova… without a telescope

By: JoeB

JoeB — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 09:12:32 +0000

What ten-year old Kathryn has done is truly amazing. But I would like to echo commenter Kathryn’s remark about significant digits. Phil, how could you? You say, “traveling about x years”, and give the number to eight!!! significant digits. It would be perfectly correct to say, “traveling about 240,000,000 years before being discovered by ten-year old Kathryn Aurora…”.

By: Pillownaut

Pillownaut — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 23:32:14 +0000

Kudos to Kathryn!! An auspicious beginning to her astronomy career, LOL… this really gives me hope. It’s not just that she made this discovery, but that she was looking in the first place! Truly awesome.

By: Matt B.

Matt B. — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 20:47:33 +0000

I’ve decided to look at the situation from the other side. Rather than being bitter that I didn’t have the same kind of opportunity that Kathryn Gray has, I’m glad that a 10-year-old somewhere does have that opportunity.

By: Fizzics Teacher

Fizzics Teacher — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 15:31:02 +0000

Kids these days. Just when I begin to worry about the future of science and education in Canada, some kid has to go and do this! Well done!

I never had any neat toys like this when I was young. Newton kept promising to make me a telescope, but he went and took that job at the Royal Mint.

By: Nigel Depledge

Nigel Depledge — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:25:07 +0000

Sweet!

And I’m just a little bit jealous.

By: Messier Tidy Upper

Messier Tidy Upper — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 02:29:16 +0000

Congratulations to Miss Kathryn Aurora(!) Gray.

Great story & great start.

Hopefully she’ll make many more astronomical discoveries – incl. the odd auroral one!

By: Thea

Thea — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 02:17:59 +0000

I’m envious…very envious…
Congratulations to Kathryn Aurora Gray for entering the record books. I first heard about it from an article in the Globe and Mail.

By: Dave Lane

Dave Lane — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 01:23:23 +0000

Great article – Kathryn is a really special kid!

ps. I’m the guy who sent her the images used to discover the SN.

By: watching the sky

watching the sky — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:30:31 +0000

Congratulations to Ms. Gray. I had seen the discovery on http://www.supernovae.net/ but didn’t realize its significance until reading this blog. I wonder how many images she looked through to find this one. I’m an amateur astronomer involved with a project with a professional in which I examine images. Some days I have as many as 1000 to look through. Since starting this past August I have 16 discoveries to date with my 16th coming yesterday (1-4). Not all have been reported to CBAT and unfortunately I did not get credit through CBAT for two of the discoveries even though finding them before the group they gave the credit to. Though CBAT has reported 335 for 2010, there have actually been 553 per the aforementioned site. Several supernovae search groups are not reporting all their discoveries to CBAT, but to ATel (http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/).

By: Matt B.

Matt B. — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:44:00 +0000

This is a case for Outliers. Any 10-year-old could do this if they had a family friend to provide the pictures and their dad knew how to report the find. (Yes, I'm bitter.) It is heart-warming that she set out to do this, but would she have done even that much without her astronomical family situation?