With the monsoonal cloudy spell finally over, I'm looking forward to more observing sessions. The current top target on my list is the newly discovered nova in Centaurus, now designated V1065 Cen. The chart can be downloaded here.
I printed the chart with the hope of using it at the first clear sky opportunity. The opportunity came tonight, but I spent at least half an hour figuring out the field represented in the AAVSO chart. When I was done, the sky had clouded out. This is a lesson in providing good scales, and preparing in advance for observing sessions.
I had some trouble determining the scale. Indicating 20"= 1 mm wasn't too helpful, since I didn't print at the correct resolution. After all, the gif was resized to fit the page, so 1 mm on the page is equivalent to a different angular distance. It took a while to find the resolution (300 dpi) and the pixel dimension (1100 x 1460) of the image. Do the math... and the field comes up to about half a degree across. And then it took another 15 minutes to relate stars on the chart to those in SkyAtlas 2000.0. This wouldn't be possible without a sky charting program since the limiting magnitude on the AAVSO chart is at least 12 while SkyAtlas goes down to just 8.5.
There's always tomorrow.
Quote from a single-someone on V day: February this year has 27 days.... Feb 14 does not exist.
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