Another nova was tentitively discovered by H. Nishimura in Japan and I went to the observatory Tues night to see if I could confirm it. Yup – its there! I took an AAVSO finder chart wit me, but it was scaled for the Stellarvue D80. I actually used the LX200 scope with a smaller field of view so it took a little “star-hopping” to locate the star field. I measured a position of RA 18h 43m 45.62sec, Dec -07deg 36min 42.0sec. I measured it at about magnitude 8.2, so it appears to still be brightening from the initial discovery report of 8.5. AAVSO Alert Notice 412 just made it official!
I’ll attach a pix for all to enjoy!
Newly discovered Nova in Scutum
Update!
This Nova has brightened to about magnitude 7.3 The following picture was taken on 11/21/2009 and includes the whole camera field. This time, I had to use a much shorter exposure to ensure that the pixels from the CCD camera were not saturated.
Randy,
It was me
I swapped the cameras Saturday to take some pics (see previouis post on guiding). I’m glad you were able to locate it anyways. Do you get e-mail notifications of the novae or do you just check out a web page?
Second, for photometry, which star did you use as the magnitude reference?
Great work!
Hi Tim,
I have “subscribed” to the AAVSO Alert Notice bulletins that come via email. Here is the link to subscribe: http://www.aavso.org/publications/email/index.shtml#alerts
The AAVSO website has a FOV plotter which identifies suitable comparison stars. In this case, there was an 8.3 magnitude star with the id 000-BCD-111. The alert email notices as well as the charts are free access from the web. I have registered with the AAVSO as an observer so that I can report observations, but I have not yet joined the organization as a formal member.
The notices are showing up almost once a day. These are actually quite relavent to amatuer astronomers as they come from professionals or others who are looking for immediate followup on an object. For example, special notice #174 was regarding an otburst of a dwarf nova. The requestor had a “tentative” detection at mag 11.5 and he was looking for confirmation of this. I used the Harken Observatory to check at that location and did NOT see an 11th magnitude object, actually nothing brighter than 15th. I looked today and the few other observations put it at about 16th mag. So its good information that the object was not at mag 11 at the time I made the observation.
This is interesting work and I am learning a few things!
Its looks like there is a nocticible increase of stars going from top to bottom. A dust patch of the Milky Way, perhaps?
South is toward the top of the image. The finder chart seems too to show a more dense star population below (northward of) the nova. The region of the sky was also getting somewhat low in the southwest. A quick look at Starry Night confirms your hunch. The field is in the Milkyway near some dark patches.