[vsnet-alert 8911] Nova Oph obs

[W.Liller]

Hola everyone --

For the record I should repeat some information from earlier messages that
I sent out to Peter Williams and to some of you, namely...

 It just happens that I took a photo of the region of your suspected nova
[Nova Oph] at 20060406.311 (about 6h 05m before your first listed
observation), and there is something there at your revised position. On my
magnitude system, I'd estimate the mag to be 10.7, but with an uncertainty
of several tenths.  (It's getting down close to my limiting mag.)  Since I
was using panchromatic film with an orange filter, this mag is somewhat --
but not greatly -- different from visual magnitudes.

There was nothing there on the night of March 30-31.

I almost certainly would NOT have beat you to the discovery had I examined
my films right away.  Congratulations on whatever it is!

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This morning at 20060408.202 and using a CCD, I measured R = 8.76 +/- 0.05
(Landolt system) where I assumed that for the standard stars, (V-R) / (B-V)
= 0.60.  My standards were the two stars of similar brightness a few
arcminutes to the east and the 10th magnitude star about 5.5' to the north.

At approximately 20060408.23, I obtained a weak spectral image in the
region of H-alpha using a 75 groove/mm objective grating on my 0.20-m f/1.5
Schmidt camera.  H-alpha was weak but present with the P-Cygni absorption
reported by several Japanese observers (CBET 469).  As they indicate, the
nova is probably near maximum brightness.

All the best to all,    Bill Liller