The Asiago supernova group maintains a catalog of historical supernovae. It reports the following information: SN - the name given by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) GALAXY - galaxy name (if it is in a catalog) R.A. - galaxy position - Right Ascension Dec. - galaxy position - Declination SN_R.A. - supernova position - Right Ascension SN_Dec. - supernova position - Declination G_TYPE - galaxy type T - galaxy type on "T" system INC - galaxy inclination PA - galaxy position angle H_VEL - heliocentric radial velcity of galaxy (the "redshift") Bt - B magnitude (brightness) of the galaxy LgD25 - galaxy size OFFSET - offset from galaxy to supernova SN_MAG - the supernova peak brightness SN_TYPE - the supernova type: Ia, Ib, Ic, In, II, etc DATE - discovery date DISCOVERER - person or group who made the discovery A relatively current example of this catalog can be found in /home/astro34/aldering/sn_factory/asiago.to_2001cj.dat Now, there are several things that the Asiago catalog does not list. Foremost among these are the date of discovery compared to the date of maximum light, and the date of the confirming spectrum compared to the date of maximum light. If the SN_TYPE of the supernova is known, then there is often a comment in the IAU Circular about whether the SN was before, near, or after maximum. Furthermore, if a paper was eventually published, the date of maximum given by the paper can be used. Using the abstract server at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html one can retrieve the IAU Circular and any papers published about any supernova (use the "Object name search" in the upper right corner; click the box to the left of IAUC and then enter a name like SN2000A into the text field just below). Using the references that are return, determine the date of maximum for the SN, and the date of the first spectrum Although Asiago already lists the discovery date, it is often only approximate. The IAUC should provide the discovery date. For numerical work it is offer best to use dates in the form of the "Julian Date", such as JD24405050; a convertor is available at http://www.science.mcmaster.ca/HAA/Scripts/JDCalculator2.html. So, the task at hand is to determine the JD dates of maximum like, discovery and first spectroscopy. In the case where a paper was published, it would be interesting to know how much data were obtained. Standard filters are U, B, V, R, and I. Often supernovae are only observed in the B filter. It would be useful to have a tally of the number of different days a given supernova was observed in each of the above filters. This task can be done most efficiently in concert with the date determination, since the ADS server will provide you will all the papers about a supernova. Note the there may be multiple papers on the same supernova - be careful to count the photometry from all of them but don't double count (that is, make sure not to count points in a later paper which you already counted in an earlier paper). To help make this easiler, if a supernova has at least 10 observations in a given filter, you can just denote this as "9+" Since only modern observations are of interest, I would suggest starting with 1990 and working up to the present. It is important to note that photometry papers usually don't appear for years after the SN discovery. Therefore, the SNe discovered in 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001 probably won't have published papers yet. In summary, for type Ia supernova discovered since 1990, determine the date of maximum, the discovery date, the date of the first spectrum, and the number of observations in each of the U, B, V, R, and I filters.