Hi Jay, Thanks for the suggestion. When I originally read the piece in S&T I figured I'd not be able to get that far south with my observatory but I had the observatory open when your message arrived so I thought I'd give it a shot. As I suspected the roof of my house and south wall of the observatory are in the way but I was able to get a shot using about half aperture. Of course there were clouds (only place in the sky) and the near full Moon was right near by but the shot does show the correct field even if only down to mag 16. Hopefully tomorrow the sky will be clear and with the Moon further to the east I'll be able to get a bit deeper. Then maybe once each night I'm working I'll shoot the area and see what pops up. Clear skies, patrick p.s. Joe, this is something you might consider from your back yard. With only a 30" or so exposure you would not have to be all that accurately polar aligned. On 06 Jul 2009, at 00:19, JayLEads wrote:
Saw the article in S&T about this and also at AAVSO site at http://www.aavso.org/publications/alerts/alert367.shtml and then the link mentioned in the article: http://www.aavso.org/news/usco.shtml
U Scorpii is expected to have a nova flare up from the white dwarf that is its companion as the white dwarf is pulling hydrogen from the companion and when it builds up after 10 +/- 2 years the white dwarf lets off a reaction to let go of the hydrogen its built up. So sometime in the next year according to Dr. Bradley E. Schaefer at LSU this should happen. When it does S&T points out that U Scorpii goes from a 17.6 magnitude star to around an 8 or 9 magnitude star. Once captured and reported, the pro's will focus their scopes here on earth and up above on it to record their data. So just wondering if anyone is monitoring this now that it looks like good weather might be coming around for while?
Jay