Nova in Cas

[JeremyS]

2 minutes ago, Paul M said:

A sawtooth curve!

I think this nova has piqued our general interest in novae. 

 

 

 

 

Indeed, Paul. And it’s amazing that we’ve had 5 novae in a year and each one has been different. This one in Cas is especially interesting though 👍🏻

[Captain Scarlet]

15 minutes ago, Paul M said:

A sawtooth curve!

I think this nova has piqued our general interest in novae. 

Piqued and peaked - a rare combination! 😃

[Paul M]

1 hour ago, Captain Magenta said:

Piqued and peaked - a rare combination! 😃

Yes, everyone should take a peek at this one!

[Captain Scarlet]

I had a quick look for this last night. It really is much dimmer now. It's very close in brightness to a close-by star which I think is SAO 20610 and brightness 8.97. They are close enough together that I can't tell which is which through my 15x56 bins, one was a bit brighter than the other. So anyway, in the region of 9th magnitude. I'm not sure if I'd be able to see it from London.

Cheers, Magnus

[JeremyS]

Latest light curve:

[Paul M]

It's been a while... but I got back to this nova with my new camera early this morning.

My target was the Bubble Nebula but it's turns out that I also caught the nova. That wouldn't happen with my old camera! M52 just edging into the picture too. With some effort I could have framed this image to get all three in nicely but it was first light night for my new camera and I was a bit giddy.

I was really just getting the feel for this fancy camera and the pesky Moon was irking me!

ASTAP photometry gives the magnitude as 9.4.

 

[JeremyS]

Nice job @Paul M 👍🏻

[JeremyS]

This nova is still showing lots of interesting activity. And still 8th mag.

[Pixies]

Popped by the nova in Cas tonight, even though it was near the zenith by the time I got round to it. It looks like it's brightening again!

Much brighter than HD220770 (mag 7.8) and nearly as bright as (and close to) HD220057 (mag 6.9). I'd say mag 7.0!

[Captain Scarlet]

I’ve just had a quick look through 10x50 Leica bins and it’s now really quite bright again. Comparing it to its closish companion HD220819 it seems about the same, checked against hd 220102 as well, I’d reckon mag 6.6!

Magnus

[Pixies]

AAVSO:

[Stu]

Amazing that it is still so active! I must have another look, haven’t checked it for a while.

[PeterW]

Roller coaster, I was going to have a peek recently, will definitely dust off the chart and have another look!

Peter

[lunator]

It has been obscured by trees until recently. It should be visible now so hopefully I can get another look 😉.

It will be interesting to see what the professionals have as an explanation for the behaviour.

Cheers

Ian

[JeremyS]

15 minutes ago, lunator said:

It will be interesting to see what the professionals have as an explanation for the behaviour.

Indeed. Similar phenomena have been seen in other slow, dusty novae. This paper discusses a similar phenomenon in another nova.

The authors note

"Many novae deviate from the stereotypical smoothly
declining optical light-curve (see, e.g., Strope et al.
2010). One intriguing behavior is the appearance of
multiple flares or maxima on top of a slowly evolving
light-curve. Several explanations have been suggested
to explain these flares, such as pulsations/instabilities
in the envelope of the WD (Schenker 1999; Pejcha 2009)
possibly leading to multiple ejection episodes (Cassatella
et al. 2004; Cs´ak et al. 2005; Hillman et al. 2014), instabilities in a massive accretion disk that survived the
eruption (Goranskij et al. 2007), or mass transfer bursts
from the secondary to the WD (Chochol & Pribulla
1998). No preferred model to explain the optical flares
has emerged, either observationally or theoretically"

So it's definitely worth following this one.

[John]

Have we really been observing this nova for nearly 6 months ?!!! 

Nice view tonight with my ED102SS refractor at 28x. Nova looks to be  magnitude 7.0 I reckon. Excellent view of the Messier 57 cluster AKA "Salt and Pepper", apparently, although Messier 37 also seems to have been dubbed that. M57 shows as a delicate fan shaped spray of resolved stars. Very nice.

Edit: Messier 57 ???? - nope, it's Messier 52 of course !!!. Doh !!!

 

 

 

Edited September 11, 2021 by John

[Stu]

I had a look for the first time in ages tonight with my 10x50 Greenkat binos. It looked the same as HD220057 to me, so I would say mag 6.9 tonight. It was nice to be able to clearly see M52 in the binoculars, it was barely visible in a scope from my old house!

@John am I missing something? M57 cluster? That’s a new one on me, so I’m a bit confused?

[globular]

I think he typoed M52 as M57.... must be dartmoor jet lag.

[John]

18 minutes ago, Stu said:

I had a look for the first time I. Ages tonight with my 10x50 Greenkat binos. It looked the same as HD220057 to me, so I would say mag 6.9 tonight. It was nice to be able to clear see M52 in the binoculars, it was barely visible in a scope from my old house!

@John am I missing something? M57 cluster? That’s a new one on me, so I’m a bit confused?

I thought Messier 57 had more of a "ring" to it !!!! 🤣

More likely lingering effects of the excellent Dartmoor Brewery products though

 

[globular]

I've been getting so few clear nights and have so much stuff I'm keen to observe that I keep forgetting to hunt this down.  Last night, though, I found myself at M52 (which presented itself rather well), remembered John's typo (above) and went looking for the nova.  It wasn't as red as I was expecting but I was pretty sure I had it from the faint redness... later confirmed from maps earlier in this thread.  I'm not experienced at magnitude estimation but based on neighbouring stars I put it at 7.
I now have 1 nova in my nova observation list. ✅😀

Edited September 15, 2021 by globular

[lunator]

Nova Cass is still quite bright. It looked reddish-orange to me.

It was fainter than bright star HD220819 (6.61)
Similar to HD220057 (6.94)
Brighter than HD220770 (7.82) star and much brighter than SAO20610 (8.97)
I estimated the magnitude to be about 7.
 

It was my 2nd novae of the night

cheers

Ian

[John]

Had a look with my 100mm refractor tonight. Brightness still seems around mag 7. I looked carefully at the colour tint of the nova tonight and thought it looked a sort of pale terracotta hue. Subtle but it became slightly more apparent with added magnification.

 

[lunator]

On 16/09/2021 at 14:39, lunator said:

Nova Cass is still quite bright. It looked reddish-orange to me.

It was fainter than bright star HD220819 (6.61)
Similar to HD220057 (6.94)
Brighter than HD220770 (7.82) star and much brighter than SAO20610 (8.97)
I estimated the magnitude to be about 7.
 

It was my 2nd novae of the night

cheers

Ian

Had a look again last night. It appeared to have faded a bit.

It was fainter than bright star HD220819 (6.61) and HD220057 (6.94)
Slightly Brighter than HD220770 (7.82) star and brighter than SAO20610 (8.97)
I estimated the magnitude to be about 7.6

The change over 48 hours was noticeable.

Cheers

Ian

[Paul M]

Had another session with the Duracell nova last night.

31 x 180 sec, massive overkill for the subject but you never know what else will show up  For anyone that doesn't know this field yet, the nova is dead center. Still going strong and ASTAP photometry tells me it's mag 8.5 . 

M52 looking all sparkly at left:

All processed in ASTAP, which has a nice annotation tool too. And it showed up an interesting field object I've not come across before, PN KjPn 8, an massive and faint planetary that is embedded in the outer reached of  the H2 region around the Bubble. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KjPn_8

My image doesn't pick up the envelope but does just show the core as annotated in this crop. If I stretch it to the max one of the brighter nodes in the envelope just shows up. Another brave project for a long dark, frosty night perhaps?

 

 

[lunator]

The Nova has brightened up again it was very similar to HD220819 (6.61)

I was surprised and checked the AAVSO data when I came in and other observations gave a similar magnitude.

Cheers

Ian