Ian Shelton was alone at a telescope in the remote Atacama Desert of Chile. After three hours getting a picture of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a wispy galaxy that orbits the Milky Way, he was plunged into darkness. High winds had taken hold of the rolltop door in the observatory’s roof, slamming it shut.
“This was maybe telling me I should just call it a night,” says Shelton, who was a telescope operator at Las Campanas Observatory on that evening of February 23, 1987.
He grabbed the photograph — an 8-by-10 inch glass plate — and headed off to the darkroom (yes, these were the days of developing images by hand). As a quick quality check, he compared the just-developed picture with an image he had taken the previous night.
Shelton noticed a star that hadn’t been there the night before. “I thought, this is too good to be true,” he says. He stepped outside and looked up. There it was — a faint point of light that wasn’t supposed to be there. He walked down the road to another telescope and asked astronomers there what they would say about an object that bright appearing in the Large Magellanic Cloud, just outside the Milky Way.
“Supernova” was the group’s response, Shelton says. He ran outside with the others — including Oscar Duhalde, who recalled seeing the same thing earlier in the evening — to double-check with their own eyes.
Read more: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/30-year-anniversary-supernova-1987a
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