In September 2024, a nova was independently discovered in Scorpius by Koichi Itagaki (Japan) and Andrew Pearce (Western Australia). Its designation is V1725 Sco.
I like to think of the lovely asterism (arbitrary star grouping) in which the nova appears (arrowed above) as:
The visual band light curve below shows the nova’s (partial) rise to around magnitude 9.5 in early September to around magnitude 13 almost a month later.
I made (and submitted to AAVSO) 6 observations of the nova with my Seestar.
The differential photometry aperture rings (red bullseye) are centred on the nova and the green highlighted stars are reference stars. Note the deliberate defocus, so that the light of the stars is spread across multiple sensor pixels, as is common for “one-shot colour” sensors such as the S50, DSLRs and others. My tests so far suggest this may be less necessary than for the DSLR photometry I’ve done in the past, possibly because of the differences between sensor sizes and the number of arc seconds per pixel.
One of the things I love about doing variable star photometry is the endless variation in the star fields being imaged, and the endlessly varying asterisms I see and can imagine about.
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