More than 40,000 people across Australia turned their eyes to the sky at more than 280 events across Australia on Wednesday night, with more than 3500 of those at the university's Acton campus.

That meant the university, in partnership with the ABC, beat its own record of 7960 people across 37 locations, set in August 2015.

As part of the successful record attempt, stargazers simultaneously observed the moon through a telescope for 10 minutes. Remote locations included Birdsville, Uluru, Alice Springs and Broome.

Speaking before the numbers had been confirmed, 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, underestimating the final result of more than five times the 2015 mark.

"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."