From IAU Bulletin 7106 (02/09/99):
.... M. Schwartz, Cottage Grove, OR, reports his discovery of a ..... supernova (mag 16.2) on an unfiltered CCD frame taken on Feb. 8.437 UT.....
Follow this Link to a NASA Web site on supernovas. It has a very nice animation and a description of what these objects are.
This is the data on Spiral Galaxy UGC 05608 itself:
This very dim and distant galaxy is too faint to appear in the Uranometria 2000 star atlas. However, note that there is an even fainter anonymous galaxy at the top of our CCD image. This is one of the most distant objects targeted to date at Kopernik Observatory.
Based on the published red shift, a rough distance estimate for UGC 05608 and supernova 1999z is: 794,000,000 light years, with the galaxy being 230,000 light years in diameter. Considering that the other stars in the image are no more than a few thousand light years at the most, it is possible to see the tremendous amount of energy released by this event.
( UGC = Uppsala General Catalog of Galaxies, 1973, Uppsala Astronomical Observatory)
Click below to
George Normandin, KAS
April 19th, 1999