[Friends_of_SSASTROS] Is It Supernova Cliff Diving Season?

[Mike McCabe]

Greetings Friends and Members of the SSAStros,
You may recall back in May the excitement surrounding the discovery of a new supernova in the grand spiral galaxy M101. Several of us aimed our equipment at it and we had many visual observing sights of it as well as many images of it. I speculated then that it might be fun to continue watching the object as it faded, which we knew it eventually would from our experience with other supernova.
Well, things seemed to going along to plan, except perhaps for the basically unobservable skies of the past couple of months. If you got out last night you may have noticed that the sky quality has improved, and so even though I didn't take a scope out I did start thinking about deep-sky targets again. One of them was SN2023ixf, which is still placed reasonably well at the onset of darkness. 
It was all sounding good on paper, then I went the AAVSO site and plotted a light curve for the SN just to have an idea what I might be expecting to see and how big a scope I should use to see it now. HOLY MOLY! In just the past 10 days the SN has dropped off nearly two magnitudes in brightness! I'm not sure exactly what's happening with it, but it's sure looking like it's a goner for visual looks. The imaging folks could certainly still pull it off, and if we get a clear night this coming week it would be awesome if someone could take a stab at it. I'd bet my bottom dollar the difference between back in May and now would be readily obvious in a side-by-side comparison...RIGHT GUYS???  


Keep Looking Up!
Mike McCabe
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://ssastros.org/pipermail/friends_of_ssastros_ssastros.org/attachments/20230812/9e9a2003/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 1691863423752blob.jpg
Type: image/png
Size: 220539 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://ssastros.org/pipermail/friends_of_ssastros_ssastros.org/attachments/20230812/9e9a2003/attachment.png>