Uh, yeah, but you LIVE IN NEW ZEALAND.

I’m at 35 degrees South.

I was wondering about all these news reports that said people could see it with a good set of binoculars. Did they know about the moon?

Heh, I thought this was a good ‘scope, but the link is broken. Still, one of the best 404 pages I’ve seen in awhile:
http://www.telescopes.com/telescopes/dobsonian-telescopes/10inchdobsonianreflectortelescope.cfm?nt_id=2&url=http://www.telescopes.com/?aid=19373

As for number 1, wow. That’s a lot of fission goin’ on I wonder if these are mostly short-lived isotopes, or if there’s just so much stuff there that even less active isotopes are enough to release that much energy? It’s so damn hard to wrap your mind around supernovas! Like neutrinos causing all that heating – you wouldn’t think it possible, but with such an inconceivably vast number of neutrinos and such an enormously dense material as that of a collapsing star… Immovable object, meet unstoppable force

Can you recommend a good entry level telescope? I’m really interested in these topics, specially in an oportunity like this.
Thanks

1) Radioactive element decay of elements created in the Supernovae (SN) takes a little while to kick in. The glowing decay of some of the heavier isotopes contributes significantly to the SN’s luminosity or so I gather.

2) The size of the explosion swells and covers more area – just as a yellow supergiant star has the same temperature as our Sun but is much brighter because its surface area is so much greater.

3) The initial raditaion from the core is contained inside an outer shell of sorts which breaks apart allowing more of the radiation to escape with elapsed time.

Anyone care to elaborate further on this, please?

*As Death From the Skies describes quite spectacularly

Just a quick correction – the LCOGT telescope in question will be one of their robotic facilities, in either Chile or Australia, not in California.

http://www.popastro.com/news/newsdetail.php?id_nw=67

(Click on my name for ref.)

…just gotta move this damn Southern Hemisphere around a bit more, though.

Hand me that crowbar…

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/10/earth-was-in-the-crosshairs/

for the impact of one very distant but still very powerful Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) back in 2008.

Then there’s this GRB :

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/03/20/naked-eye-visible-grb/

which surpassed even that in super-luminousity!

Also :

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/03/03/wr-104-a-nearby-gamma-ray-burst/

for one distant Wolf Rayet supernova candidate that could pose a (slight) threat even from across the immense gulfs of space – spanning 8000 kly in this case.

Finally, click on my name for a link that discusses what might be the most dangerous supernova candidate star of our neighbourhood – HR 8210 or IK Pegasi – a Delta Scuti variable, white dwarf pair.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geminga

&

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_Supernova_Remnant

for the Vela and Geminga supernova remnants – one nebulous, one ex-star.

See :

http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/etacar.html

for more about Eta Carinae.

Shame for me it’s circumpolar to the Northern hemisphere. Oh well, I’ll just have to settle for the online pics and news of it.

I hope someone has put tgether a sequence of all the images of it brightening and combined them into a movie!

@13. CharonPDX :

So I’m curious. If this were, say, one galactic arm away (say, at 180 degrees, straight out in the middle of the Perseus arm, so about 7500 ly away,) what would be the impact on the Earth?

Funny you should mention the figure of seven thousand, five hundred lights away – that’s just the distance to Eta Carinae. Eta Carinae being one of (if not *The*) most supermassive, super-luminous hypergiant stars in our Milky Way galaxy and oen that featured in a chapter in a great book about Death from the Skies – which (#17.) Brian has already referred to. Its was written by a Dr .. doctor .. P-something .. if I recall right! The name might’ve ended in a ‘t’ too. Sounds really familiar.. it’s just on the tip of my tongue.

Would it be disastrous (either “shock wave blows away the Earth’s atmosphere completely” or even just “enough cosmic rays to cause a cancer increase of 10%,”) would it be “OMG! SUN-BRIGHTNESS LIGHT IN THE SKY AT NIGHT!”, or would it be “Oh, look, something rivaling Venus in brightness”?

Depends on the star going supernova to some extent or so I gather. Chapter 3 in the book mentioned above deals with the supernovae threat and chapter 4 deals with a scenario where another worse type of supernova called a Gamma ray burst goes off – coincidentally from Eta Carinae -and hits us in just the right (or rather wrong) way!

For reference, the supernova that went off in 1054 A.D. and created Messier 1 – better known as the Crab nebula – was 6,500 light years away. Eveen closer at a mere 800 light years distant was the supernovae that created the Vela supernovae remnant about 11,000 years ago and the supernova that formed the Geminga pulsar was closest still estimated as being somewhere between 30 and 200 light years away in space and 340,000 years ago in time. The Geminga supernova probably formed the Local Bubble galactic region our Sun is currently travelling through too.

Source : pages 30-37, “The Star that blew a Hole in Space” by Richard G. Teske in ‘Astronomy’ magazine , December 1993.