I took some pre-dawn images via T11 at New Mexico (0.51m CDK) a couple of hours ago. The ‘pretty pic’ unfiltered 120 sec image is here.
http://martinmobberley.co.uk/images/v1405cas_20210320_1143_mpm.jpg
I also took some much shorter V filtered images. The brightest pixels in the nova disc were 30% of the way to saturation in a 5 second V shot.
Using the AAVSO chart’s somewhat dimmer mag 9.0 and 9.1 stars gives a V mag of 7.70 at 11:45 UT this morning (Mar 20). JD = 2459293.98958.
Regards,
Martin