Some interesting astronomy events got a lot of people stirring last night. A potential nova has been discovered in the summer constellation Delphinus. The discovery goes to Koichi Itagaki of Yamagata, Japan, using 0.18-m reflector + unfiltered CCD. When I went out last night to check it out, it was plainly visible as something new and unexpected at the end of Sagitta (the Arrow) and to the north of Delphinus. Here’s a finder for you taken with a D7000. It’s a pretty wide field which would be ok for binoculars. Note the positions of the Coat Hanger asterism and Delphinus. It’s an easy find!

For a smaller field of view, you can go to the AAVSO website and make a plot of the area like this one which is on the 30′ scale for wide field CCDs like that in our Robotic Telescope at the Academy.

I was totally surprised to find the star getting brighter, so bright that in under an hour, I was unable to use a photometric filtered CCD to image it without maxing out the CCD. Oh well!   Enjoy everyone, and clear skies to you!