Strange Quarks

It’s been several days since the nova in Musca was found by Rob Kaufman. The alert notice was sent out by AAVSO on January 16.

Below is the green filter channel of a DSLR image I took around midnight on January 17. The nova is shown via red markers with a faint satellite trail at upper right. Compare this with the narrow field Stellarium screenshot in my last post.

That was one of 20 images used for photometry of the nova that night. I’ve repeated this on two other nights since submitting untransformed green (visual wavelength), blue and red band observations.

My visual band (binocular and DSLR photometry) observations are shown below in purple alongside visual band contributions from others:

A polynomial fit makes the emerging pattern a little more obvious (if exaggerated in parts); up and down from night to night as is common with novae.

This morning another southern nova was discovered in the constellation Circinus (near Alpha Centauri) by John Seach in NSW at magnitude 9.1. John also discovered a bright nova in Centaurus in 2013. I have not been able to observe this yet due to cloudy conditions tonight.

Here’s a Stellarium screenshot of this latest nova’s location:

The AAVSO finder chart I will be using initially is this:

This entry was posted on January 20, 2018 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Astronomy, Science, Variable Stars. 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.