Astronomer predicts ANU has doubled or tripled world record mark
It's a "very safe bet" that the Australian National University has broken its own stargazing Guinness World Record, according to one of the record attempt's organisers.
More than 3500 stargazers turned their eyes to the sky at the university's Acton campus on Wednesday night, while thousands of others gathered at more than 280 other events held simultaneously across Australia.
The university, in partnership with the ABC, was trying to beat its own record for the most people stargazing at multiple venues.
The official count was likely to be confirmed late on Thursday night, with the current mark of 7960 people set across 37 locations in August 2015.
Dr Brad Tucker, from the university's research school of astronomy and astrophysics, said with a huge increase in the number of sites participating across Australia this time, the record had almost certainly been eclipsed.
"Unofficially, it's looking like being two or three times bigger than the current record," he said.
"We believe there were between 3500 and 4000 in Canberra alone, and we actually had another site at Parliament House, where a number of MPs and senators came out of their offices and participated.
"The fact that we had close to 300 stargazing paries across Australia is just incredible."
Dr Tucker also led a citizen science project to search for new exploding stars in space, known as supernovae.
He said at least three were discovered on Wednesday night, with all of them between 940 million light years and 1.1 billion light years from Earth.
"That might seem far away, but the universe is almost 14 billion years old, so that's actually fairly nearby," Dr Tucker said.
"It's actually right in the range that we want, because when we're measuring supernova that are further away, we want to have something close by to compare it to.
"They couldn't have been more perfect discoveries."