It’s been a few days since my first observation of N Sge 2026 (Aug 28) at magnitude 7.8. I wondered whether the decline would continue, and it has. My last observation was a little over a day ago, at around magnitude 9 and it’s now around 9.5.
As is often the way with these objects, it’s a pretty messy light curve, less so if only Johnson V observations (light green) are included, but still not clean. Still, the decline is clear. To emphasise this, the red “observations” correspond to an exponential decline model for each Johnson V observation which can be used as the basis of nova distance estimates. I’ll say more about that in a future post.
I also had a bit of fun trying to take an image of the field a few nights (Aug 29) ago by attaching an iPhone to a NexYZ clamped to the right eyepiece of my tripod-mounted 20×80 binoculars. Vibration was an issue as is evident in the somewhat blurry ~5 sec photo taken with the iPhone camera app in night mode, but it gives an idea of how faint the nova was by then (magnitude 8.6).
No Seestar-based imaging and photometry tonight due to the cloudy weather.
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