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Once a niche area for amateurs, spectroscopy is now a mainstream activity with around a hundred amateurs worldwide capable of producing research quality spectra across a wide range of targets and resolutions, tens of thousands of amateur spectra available in databases and dozens of publications a year referencing amateur spectra.

Historically amateurs have played a significant role in the discovery of supernovae and other transients. Today, although they still find over 100 supernova a year, most transient objects are now discovered by automated surveys and the amateur emphasis is shifting towards following up and characterising these events. The rapid confirmation and classification of transients is key to understanding the early history of these objects. For supernovae this needs a spectrum, which has traditionally been beyond the capabilities of amateurs due to their low apparent brightness.

Described here is a low resolution faint object spectrograph specifically optimised for supernova classification, which has been in use intermittently over the past three years at an amateur observatory in North West England. Although initially a proof of concept, to date the system has been used to confirm and classify 24 supernovae to 17th magnitude officially via the IAU Transient Name Server, 11 of which were also discovered by amateurs. These include the early classification of the much studied nearby type Ia supernova SN2018oh and the possible blue supergiant type II supernova SN2018hna.