An open optical transient survey

The Great Supernova Hunt

Join The Hunt

    Introduction

    The Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (CRTS) is an astronomical survey that covers most of the sky in order to find astronomical events such as Supernova, CV, and Blazar outbursts using data provided by the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS).

    We want to find all the supernovae occurring in nearby bright galaxies and we need your help.

    Getting Started

    All you need to do is look for new objects appearing on images of galaxies in links at the bottom of this page. Then, let us know the name of the galaxy, the date of the observations, and the location of the new object (RA, Dec). New links will appear whenever new data is taken.

    What to look for

    Supernovae look like new stars near or on top of galaxies. The following images containing supernovae discovered in the SN Hunt search galaxies. Can you find them?


    SN 2012cu in galaxy NGC 4772
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    New Image Reference Image


    SN 2012cy in galaxy UGC 6034.
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    New Image Reference Image

    Supernovae will only be seen in the new images of a galaxy. More examples of supernovae seen in search images and other recent supernova discoveries.

    What is in this for you

    We will include you as the official discoverer of any supernovae that you report to us, provided that we can confirm that they are real, they not already known, and they have not been previously been reported to us. Here is the list of our current discoveries.

    Images to search

    Only search the most recent images as people will have already looked at the older ones.

    Links to the most recent search images (sorted by date).

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