Life seems to be chugging along when suddenly there’s a thermonuclear eruption somewhere far far away. By far away I mean 5000ly!
What’s happening there?
A white dwarf star and a red giant are orbiting one another and maybe too close for comfort. The white dwarf siphons off material from the red giant star and developes a dense atmosphere which consists mainly of hydrogen. The newly accreted atmosphere is thermally heated by the hot white dwarf. With this extra mass, gravity increases and the white dwarf becomes compressed which causes it to ignite.
I’ve read that only 10 recurrent novae have been identified. So what I’m following here is quite rare
To get a visual comparison, I’ve been setting up missions to RS Ophiuchi on the same telescope at Slooh and more or less at the same time of night. Cloudy weather was persistent but just as well because the Moon might have been too bright and in close proximity on those cloudy nights.
I did not give up and last night, conditions were perfect and I got a beautiful follow-up image. There’s no doubt, RS Oph is dimming and will go into slumber mode again.
To do an accurate comparison, I have not processed or cropped these images.
Years ago OOG (The Orion Observation Group) had the courage to withstand any wind and weather and were brave enough to organise events with guest speakers. Serena Ingamells (my partner in all crimes) organised an event at the Taalmonument on 06.12.2008 and invited Dr Ian Glass ( South African Astronomical Observatory) to talk about his newly released book Proxima The Nearest Star (other than the Sun!)
It took a while to sink in that I would actually be able to see Proxima Centauri through a telecope but for a long long while I cherished the star in my own signed copy of the book.
Auke Slotegraaf published Con Cards with a page dedicated to Prox Cen. Wow! Yes! but all these years I never knew whether I had actually seen the star 😉 I mean there are many candidates out there!
Con cards https://assa.saao.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2017/10/concards_v154.pdf
My eye caught a mission by a fellow Slooh member. Once and for all I was going to find that star.
After reading Prox Cen from cover to cover, I took my images and compared them to Stellarium, rotating and flipping and about to give up, I remembered Auke’s con cards. His charts matched the stars in my image perfectly!
So I hope you enjoy my version of Proxima with a red dot finder.
This is my first image of the huge yellow star, Rho Cassiopeia. When I do public outreach I usually don’t let the line of people grow to 50+ to look at just one star. “A star is just a star ” even through my telescope. We all love to show the ooh and wow objects. I’ve observed many double stars with my own telescope – they are really pretty. It was during Helen Avery’s Constellation Story Livecasts on Slooh that observing single stars became more and more appealing and having all the different telescopes available to do so, is just awesome. And I’ve seen that a star is NOT just a star.