Images from La Palma

Forums Spectroscopy Nova in M31 Images from La Palma

#580302
Dr Paul Leyland
Participant

Images from La Palma last night are being analyzed right now but I’m still learning how to do that.  Results (possibly preliminary) will be edited into this post.  Nova certainly very obvious on the 3000s stacked image but the background from M31 is very bright and precision photometry will need to take that into account.

FWIW, I’m about to download GAIA-DR2 positions and magnitudes for analysis purposes as I don’t have a finder chart and comparison magnitudes.  I’m hoping this is satisfactory …

Results are undoubtedly preliminary because I’m still learning how to drive the tool set and much data reduction has been done by hand..  Comparing my V-band mags with GAIA’s G-band gives satisfactory results (less than 0.05 mags at mag 16) so I’m fairly confident that the nova was at mag 16.50 +/- 0.05 at 2018-11-30 02:40UT.

Now to improve my skills and tools.