Nova And 1979 ?

[Robin Leadbeater]

Anyone know anything about this nova?

While looking for a guide star for a spectrum of LL And. I noticed a 10th mag star about 5 arcmin to the east. Looking it up in SIMBAD I was surprised to see it described as Nova And 1979.  (If it is mag 10 now that should have been a very notable nova I would have thought !)  The only reference to it though is this one   from 1987 on the rate of production of galactic novae where it appears in a list of novae, discovered by Wild on16th Sept and  mag 13 at max. It does not however appear in a comprehensive list of novae maintained by Bill Gray for example.  Anyway, I took a spectra and will reduce it to see what it looks like

Cheers

Robin

[Robin Leadbeater]

Tracked down the discovery IAUC.  Difficult to say without knowing the precision of the coordinates given there but  they could be up to ~1 arcmin away from the ones in SIMBAD for this star so not sure yet where the association comes from

[Daryl Dobbs]

I’ve found this reference to Nova 1979 QB, the link below gives a reference to The Astronomer Vol 16 ppage 152

news notes – NASA/ADS (harvard.edu)

I wonder if this is the same object?

Could the difference be epoch 1950 for the IAU notification as opposed to epoch 2000 for Simbad

[Robin Leadbeater]

The answer perhaps lies closer to home !

From VSSC #83 page 7

931207 LL And B.Marsden, CBAT, Paul Wild, Switzerland, Steve

Howell, USA, T.Kato, Japan, Bruce Margon, USA Object reported as a ‘nova’ in IAUC 3412 (1979) seen again in outburst by Tony Vanmunster, Belgium 1993 Dec 7 mag 14.Ov. Confirmed by Poyner. Kato obtains CCD images at Ouda on Dec 9 V=14.0. Suggests position needs correction. Howell obtains spectra and paper planned!

Robin

[Daryl Dobbs]

Could it also be 1979 QB if anyone has got The Astronomer vol 16 page152 to compare the information with the above.

[Robin Leadbeater]

Yes  that is a a copy of the IAUC with a request for observations. (confusingly that IAUC covers several diverse object discoveries)

“Could the difference be epoch 1950 for the IAU notification as opposed to epoch 2000 for Simbad”

I was  comparing with the FK4 (1950) coordinates for the object in SIMBAD

Cheers

Robin

[Robin Leadbeater]

The TA article

http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1979Astr…16..152.

confusingly IAUC 3412 covers reports on several diverse objects including asteroid 1979QB

http://www.cbat.eps.harvard.edu/iauc/03400/03401.html

Cheers

Robin

[Daryl Dobbs]

AHH so that was the elusive 1979 QB an asteroid, at least its looking like Nova And 1979 and LL And are the same with an error in the position.

The last few nights here have been very hazy with patchy cloud and andromeda is currently over a row of LED streetlights from my house!

[Robin Leadbeater]

Here is the spectrum of BD+25 103, also  identified (likely incorrectly) in SIMBAD as Nova And 1979,  compared with an F2v standard 

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