Well, it's not my own discovery of a supernova, but it is my first observation of a known supernova! And it was by accident, so if only I'd taken my photograph 30 days earlier I might have discovered it.
I am shifting from taking NGC images in my Project NGC, to taking supernova discovery images. The Project NGC is getting to the point now that the trees to my North are causing too many problems. I have most objects between -70 and 0 Dec, it's just north of 0 Dec which it gets more tricky for me, in particular from +20 Dec and North. With the dwindling success due to the trees I'm looking at extending my knowledge and experience of the Project NGC to surveying for supernova discovery.
The work requried for supernova discovery is almost identical to what I have already been doing for Project NGC. In fact I'm using an exact copy of the software I wrote for Project NGC for supernova hunting. This makes it easy for me to build a target list for a night's observing. A key difference is that while my Project NGC database had 5399 objects to select from (not the full set of NGC's due to lattitude), my supernova database now has 95325 objects! (should keep me out of trouble for a while!).
Anyway, back to my first observation. I was photographing NGC 1954 purely for it's cosmetic value. It was a galaxy I decided to stop by on my way to the start of my NGC run for the night, but I got stuck there taking 10 minute exposures of it (it's quite an interesting galaxy). Being interested in supernova discovery I thought what better time than now to start comparing images to look for new supernova. As luck would have it my Project NGC had captured NGC 1954 back in December 2009. Comparing my new images with the 2009 image I noticed the supernova, standing out like a saw thumb. A quick google search showed it to be a known supernova, discovered on 5th December 2010 and labelled Supernova 2010ko. Here's a page of observations: http://www.rochesterastronomy.org/sn2010/sn2010ko.html
So, after a few emails back and forth, and lots of work on my behalf to get an estimate of magnitude of the supernova, one of my 10 minute exposures is now shown on the above linked page, and I'm quite happy that I have at least some little link to the supernova discovery world so early in the piece.
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