novae

It's not one, but three novae in the past month! The first was announced on Jan 24th. As I had mentioned in a previous post, I had some trouble with the finder chart. The Centaurus nova isn't very bright anyway. When it was discovered, I reckoned that it's just a bit brighter than the binocular limiting magnitude here.

Then V1280 Sco, the next to be announced, brightened to 3rd magnitude, prompting a report in SkyTonight.com. Then yet another nova got discovered, just 3° from V1280 Sco. Currently at 9th magnitude, the latest nova's probably too faint for my binos.

My attempts to capture V1280 Sco on camera yesterday didn't seem successful. The longer exposures had skies that were too bright to show stars clearly. I had to rush for work and there was no time to play with the settings. I planned to estimate its magnitude using photometry features in IRIS, if I had gotten any decent exposures at all. This morning, I ditched the camera for binos. I made my brightness estimate, and submitted it to AAVSO. The data, compiled from observers who had submitted their magnitude estimates, looks interesting. There's quite a bit of variation on either sides of 5.0 magnitude. The nova seems to be exhibiting some rather interesting short term behaviour. Ok, it could well be explained by unavoidable observational errors. In any case, I'm paying attention to the animal as far as the weather permits.

Here's the link to a shot of V1280 Sco.