Thursday, August 15, 2013
My First Images of Nova Delphinus 2013
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| Nova Delphinus 2013 imaged at 10:25 pm ACST from my back yard with my Canon IXUS 400 ASA 15 second exposure (click to embiggen) | Nova Delphinus 2013 imaged at 10:23 pm ACST from my back yard with my Canon IXUS 400 ASA 15 second exposure 3 x Zoom (click to embiggen) |
Got my first images of the nova! while I could see it reasonably well around 7:30 pm, even with light pollution and low altitude, by 10:30, when it was 30 degrees from the horizon it was very clear and obvious indeed in my 10x50 binoculars (still too dim for the unaided eye with my suburban skies).
You will need to enlarge the images to see the nova in them, in the 3xzoom the trails are streaked becuase of the magnification and exposure time. Still not bad for a point and click camera.
Using ImageJ I measured the brightness of representative stars in the image, the correlating that with their magnitude I calculated that the nova was magnitude 5.8, a bit brighter than the early reports (which is consistent with my visual impression).
You can compare the images with the charts here.
Magnitude comparison charts are here http://www.aavso.org/comparison-star-chart-nova-del-2013
# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 11:38 pm 
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