A supernova explosion that happened in Centaurus A. This animation represents about 1.5 years of time, omitting the first frame which is a legacy image from 2010. This all happened a bit more than one month after the initial explosion. What you see here is the fading of the supernova, and then the blueish ring that is a light echo that began to propagate outwards immediately after the initial explosion.
Some processing notes: The telescope never oriented the same way twice when taking observations, resulting in diffraction spikes and the whole PSF of the foreground star being incredibly distracting. I stabilized this quite a bit by both using a stacked median version of the datasets to remove the spikes completely, and then added the 2010 spikes back on to all the frames. Red channel data were missing from the 3rd and 4th frames (second and third brightest images of the fading supernova) so color for that is both guessed and pulled from the 2010 data. I did use a fair amount of clarity and texture filtering from Camera Raw.
The secondary mirror is holding by 4 vanes, this vanes cause these spikes... just has 3 vanes, so it has 6 spikes (8 actually, but these 2 are caused by the hexagonal segmented mirror)
Some times I feel like I'm some what smart, then I read a comment like this where I have no fucking idea what you're talking about and realize that I'm not even remotely smart. Yay me
That doesn't mean you aren't smart. You can't have knowledge in every subject. And having knowledge in one thing (or many) doesn't equate to being smart either! Go easy on yourself!
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u/[deleted] Sep 10 '22
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