A bright-enough nova that had been discovered in the northern sky near Cassiopeia on 18th March by Japanese Astronomer Yuji Nakamura was was photographed by me.
I was already in my pyjamas relaxing after all the activities of the IT issues at EUMETSAT, when I got reminded that we actually have a NOVA visible in the norther sky and it is CLEAR SKY!
So, despite some pandemic-lockdown-social-lazy-syndrome, I actually grabbed appropriate equipment and set my observation site behind the house beside the kitchen window – perfectly aiming at the take-off route of 1.8 Frankfurt International.
After some focussing exercise on the Big Dipper stars, I moved my mount towards the estimated location. As I did not have any finder, it was a blind-ish aim and shot. I then used a bright green laser pointer to test if my aim is roughly where iot was supoosed to be. The field of view was big enough so that I shpuld be having it “on film”. Made a few exposures, including some fine-tuning focusing (weird enough that it went out of focus) and then took what I had upstairs and compared against charts from Stellarium Software.
UPDATE: Check out the measured data by the community – 7.8m magnitude, roughly.
Yup, after some manual star-comparisons, I spotted it:
Capture Data (EXIF)
| Camera | Canon EOS 5D Mark III |
| Lens | Canon EF100-400 |
| F-stop | f/8 |
| Exposure | 15s |
| ISO speed | 1600 |
| Focal Length | 400mm |
| Date/Time and Location | 23 March 2021 at 22:33 in Griesheim |