10 August 2021, 21:30 – 22:00 (BST)
Conditions: Warm, breezy. Hazy bands of cloud moving across the sky from the southwest.
2021 is turning into quite the year for novae, with news breaking on 8-9 August that recurrent nova RS Ophiuchi had flared up after a 15-year lull. Despite the sky not being completely dark and some interference from hazy cloud, the nova was easily visible in 7x50 binoculars, forming a triangle with Nu and Mu Ophiuchi. (It doesn’t appear in the PSA, but it is plotted on chart 15 of SA 2000 as N1967.)
The variable haze made it hard to estimate its brightness, but after comparing it with other stars in the field of view, I’d guess it was somewhere between magnitude 5.5 and 5.0 (perhaps a little closer to the brighter end of that scale). When not in outburst it normally lurks at somewhere around 12th magnitude.
This is the third bright nova of the year and – even more remarkably – all of them have been easily visible from the northern hemisphere at convenient times of the evening. See more at:
Also: While I was looking at the nova, two satellites and a faint Perseid meteor passed through the field of view.
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