Environment of  SN 1998bw

R. Cannon & D. Malin, AAO, have produced detailed pre-explosion images of the parent galaxy of SN 1998bw.  The pixel size is much smaller than DSS I or DSS II frames. Both frames are taken from the glass copy of the B(J) ESO/SERC Southern Atlas, field 185, taken on 2/7/76. North is up and East is to the left, and each frames covers approximately 1 arcmin wide by 1.25 arcmin high. The frames differ in the depth of the intermediate negative.

The left frame shows the knotty structure of the spiral arms in the vicinity of the SN, which occurred on the spiral arm SW (lower right hand side) of the galaxy centre, below the brightest knot. The exact location of the SN is not known yet, but it must be very close to one of the fainter knots. The knots, which are much more prominent on blue than on red images, are presumably all HII regions and OB Associations. The right frame shows the faintest outer parts of the galaxy.

These frames are available in gif (2.1 Mb), tif (2.3Mb) and jpeg (0.4Mb) format. Use of these images in publications is encouraged, but an acknowledgement should be made that they were provided by the AAO from UKST material.

This image was taken on 30/05/98 by C. Tinney on a Director's night at the AAT.  It is a 30 sec B exposure taken with the 2 x 4 K MITLL CCD at prime focus (non-photometric conditions). The frame has been trimmed to approximately match the field size of the pre-SN images. The SN is the bright object below and left of the galaxy centre. The brightest knot is seen as a fainter companion to the SN.

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