Mandel's particular obsession is imaging: using long exposures to make pictures of celestial bodies--like his shot of the Veil Nebula supernovaremnant, which cannot be seen merely by gazing through a telescope.
"The interesting thing is that the protons don't get accelerated in the supernova explosion itself, but they get accelerated in what we call the remnant - the shockwave that is created in the explosion and then moves away through the interstellar medium, " said Dr Funk.