Strange Quarks

Not far from one of my favourite Cepheid variables (W Sagittarii), a nova in Sagittarius was discovered 3 days ago (TCP J18102829-2729590) by Koichi Itagaki of Japan. It has risen from magnitude 11 to 8 in that time.

The plot below shows the 10 visual and Johnson V observations submitted so far to the AAVSO International Database:

Two thirds of the visual observations are from Andrew Pearce in Western Australia. My single observation so far, made tonight, is under the cross hairs at upper right, with Andrew close on my heels. It’s always reassuring when two observations made close in time (less than an hour in this case) by different observers agree, within the limits of precision of the chosen method (visual estimation: approximately one tenth of a magnitude).

Many of my visual estimates of variable stars are made with 7×50 binoculars. Tonight I used my Meade LX-90 8″ telescope (magnification of 82x) because the nova is still too faint for my binoculars. There’s a beautiful asterism near the nova that makes the field hard to miss and makes for an enjoyable observation.

Last night I took images of the nova with the intention of carrying out wide field DSLR photometry, however there’s a star quite close to the nova. When combined with the amount of defocus normally used for DSLR photometry, separating the light from the two stars becomes impractical. So, I haven’t submitted an observation (untransformed) from that imaging run.

I’ll follow this object visually with interest for as long as the weather and my equipment allow.

This entry was posted on October 23, 2016 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Astronomy, Science, Variable Stars, VStar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.