How often do they catch supernovae in general? Really often apparently: http://www.cbat.eps.harvard.edu/lists/Supernovae.html http://www.cbat.eps.harvard.edu/l

How often do they catch supernovae in general? Really often apparently: http://www.cbat.eps.harvard.edu/lists/Supernovae.html http://www.cbat.eps.harvard.edu/lists/Supernovae.html If you mean like the 8th magnitude that this article says it could reach, then the last one to come close (and surpass it by far) was 1987A (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A) at 4.5 magnitude (I remember hearing about that when I was a kid). 1972E was 8.5. 1954A was 9.8. 1937C was 8.4. 1895B is listed as 8.0. 1885A at 5.8. There are some negative magnitude ones listed at the end of the list (1006, 1054, 1572, 1604) which were within the Milky Way. (There are wikipedia articles about those supernovae and older ones as well.)