Guess what? Nova ASASSN-17hx is brighter than ever – 26 July 2017
The galactic nova ASASSN-17hx continues to amaze us: it is now continuously brightening, day after day, making observers happy to have such an easy-to-see erupting star out there. We have just found it at mag. 8.1 in our CCD images.
Galactic nova ASASSN-17hx in Scutum: 26 July 2017
The image above is the average of five, 30-seconds exposures, unfiltered, remotely taken with “Elena” (PlaneWave 17″+Paramount ME+SBIG STL-6303E) robotic unit available at Virtual Telescope. The image scale is 1.2″/pixel. The object is marked with two red lines, in the center. Seeing was not good, this is why the stars ar not as sharp as usual.
At first glance, the star looked brighter than ever. We had to use short exposures to have it not saturated on our CCD images. We have found ASASSN-17hx at mag. 8.1 (unfiltered, R-mags for the reference stars from UCAC-4), so 0.7 magnitudes more than 2 days earlier, so it gained more than one magnitude in four days! We would say that visually this star would be somewhere in the 8.6 – 9.0 interval. We prepared some useful star charts to find this nova: observing it visually has never been so easy (and it will not last forever…)!
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