People might be interested to know that this story is indicative of a sea change in astronomy. It has become apparent that there is a lot of variability in the

People might be interested to know that this story is indicative of a sea change in astronomy. It has become apparent that there is a lot of variability in the nighttime sky, and we now have the technical means to discover lots of new things. One major factor in this change has been the advent of wide-angle surveys, that repeat often enough to find variable sources like SN's, blazars, asteroids, lensing events, etc., while they're still interesting. The Palomar Transient Factory (http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ptf/ http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ptf/) is the one mentioned in the article, but there are many others. They automatically detect and post events in a standard XML format for anyone (including robotic telescopes) to scoop up (e.g., http://www.skyalert.org/events/all/2/ http://www.skyalert.org/events/all/2/). One of the largest, LSST, is now being designed, and its data volume will prove to be a huge engineering/computer science challenge (http://www.lsst.org/lsst/science/petascale http://www.lsst.org/lsst/science/petascale). There's a sophisticated and multifaceted image processing pipeline to detect the changes in sources, to automatically extract photometric parameters, and to pass these parameters on to a classifier to separate the events into types of interest to various communities (the SN folks could care less about asteroids).