Naked Eye Nove in Scorpii

[LX200]

Ian Musgrave from SA sent this along
http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/5468/437/1600/372642/Nova_Scorpii_2007.jpg

There is a nova bright enough to see with the unaided eye in Scopius!
Not very bright, it is about as bright as epsilon Crucis, the fifth
star in the Southern Cross, but seeing one of these exploding stars at
all with the unaided eye is something. The bad news is that you have
to get up between 2:00 am and 4:30 am to see it. To locate the nova,
look to the east in the early morning and find the bright red star
Antares , the brightest star in that part of the sky, which forms the
heart of the J shaped Scorpius, looking to the right of Antares, you
will see two bright stars, the one furthest to the right is epsilon
Scorpii, the nova is the brightest star under that. :thumbsup:

[tornado33]

Thanks. With assistance of Star Atlas pro I have entered its precise position into my Argo navis, will try imaging it maybe Sat or Sun. morning next when I can sleep in afterwards :)
Its position according to the AAVSO is
16h57m41.26s, -32, 20' 35.6"
Scott

[avandonk]

Here is an image I took of the nova between 4 and 5 morning of 18-02-07.
And an image of the same area taken July last year. FOV is 6.8 x 4.6 deg
Nova Sco is in the right hand image almost dead center.
Bert

[Ric]

Nice images Bert, it really is quite bright. I'll have to get a look at the weekend.

Cheers

[sheeny]

Thanks Bert! The old alternating images does the trick. Nicely registered by the way!

Al.

[avandonk]

There is a trick to that Sheeny. If I want two images to have perfect register and they are of different FOV, I just simply use RegiStar and open the smaller FOV image. Then under operations register. Here is the tricky bit then combine (set dimensions to - intersection) combine but set the weight of the smaller opened image to a small value say .002 and then the resultant will be a perfect matching area from the bigger FOV to the smaller FOV. If the image sizes are vastly different it is worthwhile to do a rough crop of the larger image to more match the smaller otherwise file sizes get huge.

Bert

[Rob_K]

Skies have been hazy/cloudy of a night here lately, but got an opportunity to snap a few shots of the nova last night. Bit of star trailing, and fuzzier stars at top are because of field rotation & single-point aligning in Registax (no tracking, + less than perfect focussing). Managed to get just a couple of wider field ones with Jupiter that I haven't looked at yet, but then the cloud came in again. Can't go very deep with my gear, but I suppose it makes the brighter stars stand out!

Cheers -

[tornado33]

I will see if I can image it Sat or Sun morning here.
Scott

[Rob_K]

Here is the wider field image, with titles.

Cheers -

[tornado33]

Heres the nova, taken with Berts 300mm lens. (I still had the UHCS filter in from earlier deep sky imaging) Its a single 10 minute ISO 400 shot @f2.8, with modded 350D camera taken last night, very low only 15 or so degrees up.
Scott