This May we were in a fortunate situation: clear skies and a new supernova to observe. The advanced astronomy classes had the opportunity to reduce and analyze the data and feed their results to the AAVSO. Below is a 300 second lum-filter integration of the region of SN 2023ixf in Messier 101. At peak, this object reached an astounding magnitude in V ~ 10.8

Messier 101, the Pinwheel Galaxy, and the supernova are 20.9 million light-years distant. The supernova was confirmed as a Type II meaning it was once a very massive star which, at the end of its “life cycle” had expanded into a red supergiant and imploded resulting in the explosion phenomena you see here.