On July 8, 2026, Patrick Wiggins was at his telescope in his home near Tooele. Nearly every clear night, he takes multiple pictures of hundreds of galaxies and compares them to pictures he took years ago. Usually, nothing has changed. This time was different.
"Every now and then, as happened in this case, the new picture has a dot on it that wasn't in the old picture and you go, 'I wonder what that is,'" said Wiggins NASA's Utah ambassador and public outreach specialist at the University of Utah.
Thinking it could be an asteroid, Wiggins waited a few more minutes and tried again. The dot was in the same place.
"Asteroids move; supernovae do not. Maybe I've got something here. Then my heart rate kind of goes up," he said. "If this is real, I may be the only person on the planet that's seen this."
Wiggans had discovered his 10th supernova, an exploding star in the NGC 3310 galaxy 40 million miles away. This was his brightest one yet; most supernovae fade from view after a few weeks. After nearly 10 weeks, it's still the brightest supernova currently visible on the online forums that track them.
Astronomers have classified it as a type 1a-CSM, a less common type of supernova defined by how its explosion interacts with the material surrounding the star, prolonging its glow to help it remain bright.
"This one, it's taunting me. Every night I look at it and it goes, 'I'm still here,'" Wiggins said.
Wiggins is one of thousands of amateur astronomers around the world who keep an eye on the sky and report their discoveries. Then, professional astronomers follow up to hopefully confirm the discoveries.
"I think it was Einstein who said that if you do the same thing over and over and over again and expect a different outcome, that's insanity. Well, that's what supernovae people do," said Wiggins. "I'm not a professional and yet I and many others contribute to the body of science. That's why I've been willing to spend literally thousands of hours of fruitless searching just so that every now and then I find something."
Road to the sky
Wiggins' love of the sky began at age 8 or 9, when he saw Saturn through a telescope. After high school, he joined the Air Force, then flew as a civilian pilot until 1975. Ready for a change, he joined what was then Salt Lake City's Hansen Planetarium, working his his way up from an usher and bookstore clerk until the U took over and Wiggins began his career university career.
That same year, Wiggins joined the Salt Lake Astronomical Society and began spending more and more time studying the night sky. He currently does outreach for the U's Department of Physics & Astronomy, going to classrooms and participating in stargazing events to get people excited about the universe.
As a NASA Solar System Ambassador, he far exceeds the required four public programs per year. In 2014, NASA flew Wiggins to Washington D.C. to award him its Distinguished Public Service Medal, the space agency's highest civilian honor. At the ceremony, Wiggins couldn't resist joking about an even better honor.
"I said, 'Well sir, this isn't really the highest award you could give me. You could send me to space."
Though Wiggins failed to get NASA-sponsored a ticket to the heavens, he's been putting money aside for a future trip, watching the cost of commercial spaceflight slowly decline.
Until then, he keeps his head in the clouds by flying airplanes and skydiving-a passion he's practiced since1965. Wiggins has completed around 2,000 jumps and has nearly two hours of accumulated free fall. He's proud to be a member of club "JOS": Jumpers Over Seventy.
"The joke is that because I fly and I skydive and I do astronomical research, I'm either in the sky or I'm studying it," he said. "My happy place is the sky."
