How "fast" do astronomical events occur?
A supernova (and many other interesting events) starts abruptly -- a flash of neutrinos lasting just a fraction of a second, but then different aspects of the event play out over minutes, days, hours or years.  The astronomy community has for some years been developing increasingly sophisticates ways to deal with such events early on. Instruments with a very wide field of view (gravitational observatories, neutrino observatories, gamma ray detectors on satellites) detect the events initially and bring first networks of robotic telescopes and then humans and still larger telescopes into the loop to try and get as much information as possible about the violent and fast developing early stages. See for example http://growth.caltech.edu/

Other things are slower. The "something coming out of a black hole" (not really that, just something coming from very close to a black hole) event takes a long time, this was just the first occasion when they'd observed that black hole with the right instrument.