On May 20th, a supernova was detected in M100 and on the night of the 21st it was clear in Virginia though wildfire smoke had a major negative effect on transparency. I didn’t think it would be a good night for trying to do detailed, faint imaging but when someone suggested the supernova I thought I would give it a try.

The sky was so bad that I could barely see any stars with my eyes so I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to do anything but thankfully the scope could see both the galaxy and the supernova. It was immediately obvious as a bright dot that wasn’t present in my images of M101 from 2021.

I gathered just under two hours of RGB data and did a quick integration in the morning. I wasn’t trying to do a detailed galaxy image but wanted enough galaxy detail to give the supernova some visual context. Thankfully the amount of data I had was sufficient for that.

For all the technical details, see astrobin.

The image below is from 2021 and the lack of the bright ‘star” in the spiral arm should be immediately evident. The older image has many more hours of integration time and includes hydrogen alpha data so it is quite.a bit more detailed.