Any residual visual light from this supernova - the most distant naked eye object ever seen - will probably be washed out by the full Moon, but here's a finder chart anyway. May be worth throwing a quick binocular on: My amateur finder chart at: http://gallery.utahastronomy.com/main.php?g2_itemId=11063 Decimal position data from Swift Uvot image files at: http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/sdc/list?seq=sw00306757000.013 converted to ra-dec: Right-ascension 217.917 143139.99 Declination 36.304 +361813.1 Approx. 2 degs due south dec of gam Boo. NASA Press releases http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/mar/HQ_08086_Swift_Detects_GRB.html http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/brightest_grb.html ====== "This burst was a whopper," said Swift principal investigator Neil Gehrels of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It blows away every gamma ray burst we've seen so far." Swift's Burst Alert Telescope picked up the burst at 2:12 a.m. EDT, March 19, and pinpointed the coordinates in the constellation Boötes. Telescopes in space and on the ground quickly moved to observe the afterglow. The burst is named GRB 080319B, because it was the second gamma ray burst detected that day. Swift's other two instruments, the X-ray Telescope and the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope, also observed brilliant afterglows. Several ground-based telescopes saw the afterglow brighten to visual magnitudes between 5 and 6 in the logarithmic magnitude scale used by astronomers. The brighter an object is, the lower its magnitude number. From a dark location in the countryside, people with normal vision can see stars slightly fainter than magnitude 6. That means the afterglow would have been dim, but visible to the naked eye. . . . . GRB 080319B's optical afterglow was 2.5 million times more luminous than the most luminous supernova ever recorded, making it the most intrinsically bright object ever observed by humans in the universe. The most distant previous object that could have been seen by the naked eye is the nearby galaxy M33, a relatively short 2.9 million light-years from Earth." ======= Blogged reports from around the world by professional observatories http://grad40.as.utexas.edu/grblog.php?view=burst&GRB=20080319B Swift site xray and visual camera images http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/swift/swiftsc.html - Kurt ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs