All pictures marked with AAT are © Anglo-Australian Observatory and Photograph by David Malin. They are used with permission. If you would like copies for personal use, they may be downloaded from their page. If you would like to use these pictures for any other purpose (including placing them on websites), please contact Coral Cooksley for details. For technical information beyond that cited here, contact David Malin.
They are being cool enough to grant me permission to use them on these pages, so please respect their copyright. -Jamey
"When the AAT is used as a camera it has a focal length of 12.7 metres and a focal ratio of F/3.3. The square field covers one degree of sky (about two moon diameters on a side) and the images are recorded on special black and white photographic emulsions coated on glass plates 255mm (10 inches) square. The UK Schmidt is primarily a photographic survey telescope and has a focal length of 3.07m with a focal ratio of F/2.5. It photographs a 6.6 x 6.6 degree field on plates or film 356mm (14 inches) square. "
"The colour images are created by combining 3 separate exposures with combinations of plates and filters designed to record blue, green or red light. For the faintest objects exposures of 90 minutes are required for each colour. The monochromes are then manipulated, enhanced and combined photographically to produce the final picture, which show the object much as it might appear in the telescope if our eyes were much more sensitive to the colour of faint light."
-David Malin
All pictures marked with UKS © Royal Observatory, Edinburgh/Anglo- Australian Observatory, Photograph from UK Schmidt, and plates by David Malin. They are used with permission.
The note above about the use of the AAO pictures also applies to the UKS pictures. Once again, please respect the wishes of the copyright holders, and note that pictures for personal use only may be downloaded from their page. -Jamey
The HEASARC Supernova Page at Goddard Space Flight Center, which made available most of the pictures in the animated sequence on the main page. The new frames were assembled with the old by Jamey Minnis.
The pictures of SN1987a and its ring structure labeled with HST, are taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and (very kindly) made publicly available on the net. They may be found at the Hubble Space Telescope Public Picture Archive, along with many other pretty pictures.
The pictures of sn1994d and the painting of the supernova are taken from the public picture archive at S.E.D.S. They are listed as public domain.
Whitelock P.; Catchpole, R.; M. Feast, ÒSN 1987A Light Curves.Ó Supernovae: The Tenth Santa Cruz Summer Workshop in Astronomy and Astrophysics. pp. 15-35. Pub. by Springer-Verlag, 1991. 789 pgs.
The two .mpg movies are downloaded from The Astronomical Pictures and Animations Archive at the University of Riennes. As they were found in a public domain archive, they are presumed to be public domain. The information below comes is for the file novaconvection.mpg. The supernova convection movie had no documentation to accompany it, but it's pretty cool looking!
This movie shows the time evolution of density in a small box at the surface of an accreting white dwarf about to undergo a nova explosion. The bottom part (blue, denoting higher density) is the actual white dwarf core, whereas the convective part (red, denoting lower density) is the accreted hydrogen envelope (or the white dwarf atmosphere). The yellow and the green parts denote the actual layer in which a thermonuclear explosion is on its way to causing a nova explosion. (This simulation was performed on a Silicon Graphics workstation by Anurag Shankar in collaboration with David Arnett of the U. of Arizona.)