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Details:
Both are Type II (core-collapse) supernovas. The spiral galaxy containing them, UGC 242 (mag. 13.4), is in Pisces 2.5° east of the naked-eye star chi Pegasi.
Photo #1, taken through an astrograph, shows the supernovas' appearance after midnight of Nov 3-4. Magnitude values for this date from the Latest Supernova webpage are mag. 15.7 for "afqd" and 18.2 for "yum", but the latter seems wrong--I can't reach that deep inside the city's skyglow. The estimates there for "yum" are rather discordant anyway; those for mag. 16.7 or maybe 17.0 seem more likely.
Photo #2 was taken earlier the same night with a smart scope. Despite having less than half the focal length of the astrograph, it managed to record both supernovas as distinct star points, although I doubt that even it can get past mag. 18 in town (meaning that "yum" is brighter than that). I did try out the scope's AI noise reduction process, but it considered "yum" to be noise and removed it, so I posted the livestacked image instead.
Both photos have been sized to have the same image scale so you can flip between them. Photo #1's Micro-4/3 camera has a large FOV advantage over photo #2's smart scope's camera even after cropping the former to remove edge artifacts, so that's why the smart scope's image is only a subset of the astrograph's.
Finally, I was surprised to find the galaxy PGC 212516 (mag. 16.7) so prominent in photo #1--my own "little red dot". Like JWST's red dots, this galaxy is far, far away--over a half billion light years distant, and more than 3x farther than UGC 242. Even the smart scope shows it as orangish.
Technical tip: When I uploaded the Seestar image with watermark to the astrometry server, it failed after 10-15 minutes of prolonged agony on their supercomputer. Crop off the watermark first, and it platesolved in seconds.
Photos:
#1: astrograph image
#2: smart scope image
Data sources:
... supernova data from the Latest Supernovae webpage
... galaxy distance data from NED
... FOV data from nova.astrometry.net
... other data from Sky Safari Pro v.6 for the iPad
Photo data:
#1: Panasonic G9, Askar FRA 600, iOptron GEM45G, ASIAir+
... 104 x (f/5.6, 60 sec, ISO 1600) = 1 hr 44 min
... N up W right, FOV = 1.1° x 1.3°
... stacked in Deep Sky Stacker, edited in Paint Shop Pro 2023
... date: Nov 4, 2026 12:05am-2:17am MST
#2: Seestar S50 smart scope
... 61 min, live stacking, equatorial tracking, no in-camera AI noise reduction
... N up W right, FOV (above the watermark) = 0.72° x 1.17°
... date: Nov 3, 2026, timestamped 10:39pm MST
Photographer's website:
No URL provided.
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