Which supernovae search method ?

Have you wondered which search method is best suited to discover supernovae? Supernova hunter Michael Schwartz, from Oregon, USA, has made some number crunching on recent SN discoveries. Some of his statistics and comments are in these and following pages. Michael says: My concern is that SNe hunters get the right idea about how to find supernovae. I think that observers can learn a lot from looking at the results of different programs, especially when it is time to choose a list of candidate galaxies. The following are some simple statistics describing three different type of search: (1) Robert Evans is the perfect visual hunter; (2) POSS discoveries are the ideal large field photographic approach; (3) the Berkeley Automated Telescope is the ultimate busy CCD. For each method we show two statistics. They show the number of supernovae discovered by galaxy magnitude and by supernovae magnitude.