I took this image on NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) while taking a near infrared spectrum of the supernova. The image was captured with the visible light guider camera (MORIS). IRTF is a 3-meter telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. It's a big scope, but the guider is definitely not made for astrophotography. The magnification is immense! I put a 10arcsec scale bar on the top left, and marked the supernova. The supernova is a peculiar Type Ib. This is a massive star that has shed its outer Hydrogen layer, but not all of its Helium, before its core collapses. The supernova and host galaxy are around 80 million light years away.
This is a false color image taken in the SDSS g and r bands. I wanted to get SDSS i band as well, but the dichroic which sends the visible light to the guider cuts of at 700nm. Total exposure time was around 1 hour, with individual frames of 10s. I was using the guider to keep the supernova in the slit of the infrared spectrograph, so I couldn't make individual exposures any longer than that. I used python to align and stack the frames. I mapped r, (r+g)/2, g to R,G,B, and scaled with a lupton stretch.