Looking the other way

The night sky is a big place. It is so big in fact that it is difficult to monitor all of it all the time. Sometimes, despite the many amateur and professional astronomers looking skywards, something goes bang and we miss it. That happened back in June 2007 when the star USNO-A2.0 0450-03360039 exploded and became a naked eye novae. Nobody on Earth saw it. Luckily, during October 2007, ESA's XMM-Newton accidentally spotted the novae as it was slewing from one target to another and alerted everyone else. It is pretty amazing that between six billion people we failed to spot one of the brightest novae for almost a decade.

There are plans such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope to map the entire sky on a daily basis but they are have not yet been built. In the mean time we will continue to rely on the amateur astronomers of the world and serendipitous discoveries such as this one.

Tags: XMM-Newton | novae

Posted in astro blog by Stuart on Saturday 19th Jul 2008 (01:25 BST) | 6 Comments | Permalink

Comments: Looking the other way

It's not really that amazing that no one on Earth saw this naked eye nova in June or July last year. Puppis is essentially in conjunction with the Sun during the summer. What _is_ amazing is the bad information out there on the web regarding this story. I try to clear things up a bit on my blog http://simostronomy.blogspot.com/

Cheers,

Mike

Posted by Mike Simonsen on Saturday 19th Jul 2008 (18:20 UTC)

Umm, Mike. At 5 June, when the article says the Nova happened, Puppis is 45 degrees above the horizon at astronomical twilight in my part of the southern hemisphere. For at least the first half of June, anyone wandering out in the early evening between 7 pm and 9 pm could have seen it. Puppis is star rich though, and could easily be missed.

Posted by Ian Musgrave on Tuesday 29th Jul 2008 (21:46 UTC)

Comet Boatini!!! Where was every semi-serious southern hemisphere amateur astronomer looking in the first half of June? At comet Boattini, WHICH WAS JUST UNDER PUPPIS! My Sketch book has entries for June 3 and June 9, bracketing the June 5 nova date (and I looked on other days when I didn't sketch). When locating Boattini I scanned through Puppis, and used some Puppis stars as magnitude estimators. FRACK! I just checked the location, I would have scanned straight over it while doing my magnitude estimations AND I DIDN'T NOTICE!!

I feel, I don't know, so unastronomical.

Posted by Ian Musgrave on Tuesday 29th Jul 2008 (22:09 UTC)

Of course, the nova was in 2007, and we were watching in 2008 (now I feel really stupid). But the point is that us southern hemisphereians could have seen it, as Puppis is quite high enough to pick out 4th magnitude objects well after astronomical twilight. Just .. not on June 5 2008(sighs)