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A comment on Taking a Picture of a Supernova While Setting Up a New Camera. Parent comment

Re:Taking a Picture of a Supernova While Setting Up a New Ca... by yborg on Wednesday February 21, 2018 @06:19PM (#16433848)
From the Nature paper:

"We note that the chance probability of this discovery is of the order of 10^−6 assuming a duration of 1 h and one supernova per century per galaxy. If we consider other factors, such as the sky conditions of the observing site and the location of the supernova away from bright host-galaxy regions, then this probability decreases by one order of magnitude."

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Re:Taking a Picture of a Supernova While Setting Up a New Ca... by T-hawk on Wednesday February 21, 2018 @08:21PM (#16434444)
Remember the principle of multiple endpoints. We only noticed this one example because it hit; we never notice all the cases that don't.

If between 10^6 and 10^7 cameras have been tried out by taking pictures of space, then this one supernova incident is right at about the expected value.

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Re:Taking a Picture of a Supernova While Setting Up a New Ca... by gmiller123456 on Thursday February 22, 2018 @10:12AM (#16438041)
This would only be true if people pointed at random galaxies in the sky. There are only a few thousand galaxies in the NCG catalog that an amateur would even be able to see, and only a few dozen that an amateur would actually be interested in photographing.
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Re:Taking a Picture of a Supernova While Setting Up a New Ca... by chrisweekly on Thursday February 22, 2018 @01:17PM (#16439838)
Duration of 1h??

That's... astonishing.

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