Affiliation
Nucleo de Estudo e Observacao Astronomica - Jose Brazilicio de Souza (Florianopolis, Brazil) (NEOA-JBS)
Tue, 12/03/2013 - 00:16
Dear friends,
According to CBAT Transient Objects website we've got a bright nova in Centaurus (5.5 magnitude).
More information:
http://www.cbat.eps.harvard.edu/unconf/followups/J13544700-5909080.html
AAX
As soon as I heard about this pink hue to the star, it cast my mind back to another nova I monitored for a brief time at maximum many years ago.
Nova Muscae 1991 also appeared to have a very strong 'rose' tint to it - something I'd never seen before or since. I wonder if any of our visual observers here had a similar experience with bright novae at or near maximum?
And thanks everyone for the discussion on this. I've followed it with interest.
Jon
HMm. On 13 Jan Arne and I got a timeseries over the same period. It shows the same decline, but mine are consistently around 0.05 brighter in V. Up till know I have been very pleased with the fit of my observations with the BSM South data - we've been observing at almost identical times.
I only used 2 comp stars in my ensemble on 13 Jan. I might redo the reducation using my usual four and see what happens. It might mean I capture less of the timeseries; two of the comp stars had drifted out of the usable part of the field by the end of the run, which is why I didn't use them. But if it improves the accuracy that would be better.
There seems to be an interesting increase in the rate of oscillation. SOme of the observations, especially visual, are leaping around a fair bit over the last few days, but using the polynomial fit tool in VStar shows a plausible pattern - oscialltions of a period around 1 to 1.5 days. See the attached light curve.
I've used V, visual and unfiltered with V zero point data here. Very approximate, but the data is still so thin that I needed to use all three.
Cheers
Jonathan