Supernovae are so rarely seen in our own galaxy, the milky way that you need to peer much much further to find many more, you need to hunt for them in other galaxies. Professor Alex F uns one of the most successful search teams on Earth for doing just that, in their best year they discovered almost 100.

There is no calendar telling you where and when to look for supernovae, you just look kind of randomly at as many galaxies as you can repeatedly and occasionally a supernova will go off in one of them, i mean they are rare only two or three supernovae per galaxy per century, so you really have to scan thousands of galaxies in order to increase your odds of finding a few each year. This robotic telescope automatically takes pictures of over 1000 galaxies a night, and it compares those new pictures with pictures of the same galaxy it had taken previously, if there are something new in one of the new pictures, like a new star, that's an excellent candidate supernova, that's the kind of thing that we want to keep studying.