[vsnet-alert 10764] Re: re Spectrum of Nova Car 2008: an Fe II classical nova

[bydra at Safe-mail.net]

Okay, ta!

I suppose with something this bright it'll need the amateurs to do astrometry.

Well, just in case, though I'm sure other's have noticed, here's a possible reason the astrometry needs a bit of priority :-

http://hla.stsci.edu/hlaview.html and enter

11 13 54, -61 14 00 r=.02

at the search input.

Hubble images of the surrounding field, from the LO-LAT survey, and some others.  There're several servers where you can get at these data, the above is via the Hubble Legacy Archive.

The above search returns a 2 Pi in the Sky pixels (ie 2 x 36 arcsecs) size search about the Pi in the Sky position.

The area isn't covered completely, but with luck...

The MIRVIS stuff is centred near where Johnson V is, passband wise, but a much wider bandwidth (pretty much a no filter image it seems), any progenitor in the field could likely have some photometry done on it for folk who know how to use IRAF for such.  It seems some MIRVIS stuff is centred on 720 nm though, which I'm not too clear on, but that's roughly midway between Rc and Ic, with a bandwidth from about half a micron (mid V) to a micron.

But if we were all really lucky, it'd be the G750L fields the thing lay in.  Slitless spectra.  The G750L spectra have a range from 524 to 1027 nm, centred on 775 nm, and are apparently low resolution, and I've no idea how you recognise which star is which from those images, ie to tie 'em into positions and/or the visual images.  Processing would probably be simple for them IRAF users that know what calstis and wavecal and the like are, for extracting the spectra, and the chance of a progenitor's spectra from archival Hubble data would be a bit of luck.

I've eyeballed some of the spectra in the fits file, you can see absoprtion lines in some of them, and emission lines too a smaller few.  There don't seem to be any derived 1d or 2d spectra archived anywhere from them, though, so folk have to roll their own.

Still, there's a lot of sky around here not covered too, neither with images and especially not with spectra, and the fields will be crowded and the images deep, so it all depends on some tight astrometry.

Cheers

John





-------- Original Message --------
From: "Arne Henden" <arne at aavso.org>
Apparently from: ahenden at gmail.com
To: bydra at safe-mail.net
Cc: vsnet-alert at ooruri.kusastro.kyoto-u.ac.jp
Subject: Re: [vsnet-alert 10759] re Spectrum of Nova Car 2008: an Fe II classical nova
Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:28:07 -0500

> Hi John,
> Nope - we have spectra, but no coordinates!  I'm sure this oversight
> will be corrected sometime soon.
> Arne
> 
> On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 8:23 PM,  <bydra at safe-mail.net> wrote:
> > Howard Bond informed :-
> >
> > "A spectrum of the nova candidate in Carina announced by K. Malek [vsnet-alert10740] was obtained with the SMARTS 1.5m telescope on Cerro Tololo by M.Hernandez and F. Walter on 2008 Nov 30.37.  The spectrum covers the range3650-5450 A with a resolution of 4.3 A.
> >
> > We confirm that the object is a classical nova, of the "Fe II" type. Thespectrum is dominated by broad emission lines of the Balmer series and of Fe II emission features.  The FWZI of H-beta is about 4000 km/s."
> >
> > Lovely stuff!
> >
> > Anyone know if there's there been any precision astrometry for this object yet?  Or have I not been looking around hard enough?
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > John
> >
> > John Greaves
> >