Irons in the Fire

• Double star list for ‘Planetarium for the Palm’
• Updating list of confirmed novae for charting purposes
• Searching for novae

Unflagging effort is probably the most important quality needed in finding a nova. Alfredo Pereira, discoverer of Nova Aquilae 1999 No. 2, introduced me to the word ‘assiduity’ from the article linked to. Assiduity levels are hard to keep up.

Research on topics related to novae are keeping me from going out into the field as often as I'd like. Cloudy nights are not helping.

• A project I'm involved with, not related to novae, is reducing the Paul Couteau table of double stars for the software program ‘Planetarium for the Palm’.

This involves researching the stars on the Internet including updating the orbits based on an Excel program I found on the web. I'll probably split the list of 744 stars into at least 3 groups based on the separation of the primary/secondary stars.

• The nova related project involves creating a list of all known novae bringing the list as up to date as possible.

I became most interested in nova hunting when I produced the following chart based on a preliminary list of 361 novae. The drop-off of ‘finds’ for stars reaching maximum visual magnitude that are greater than 7th mag. was intriguing to say the least. Here is a rough idea of what I saw:

Mag  No. Graph
>1st  3  #
1st   2  #
2nd   5  ##
3rd   5  ##
4th  12  ######
5th  14  #######
6th  24  ############
7th  51  #########################
8th  39  ###################
9th  45  ######################
10th 34  #################
11th 32  ################
12th 14  #######
13th  9  ####
14th  8  ####
15th  5  ##
16th  6  ###
17th  3  #
18th  2  #
99th  3  #

You would think that the number of ‘finds’ would increase as magnitudes increase. I wouldn't have guessed that there was a drop off after 7th magnitude.

This is main thing that prompted me to search for novae visually at a limiting magnitude deeper than 7th magnitude.