Build Date: Mon Mar 10 08:20:08 2025 UTC
If that's all there is, my friend, then let's keep dancing. Let's break out the booze and have a ball. If that's all there is.
-- Peggy Lee
There's a new star in town...
1999-12-06 12:33:31
Yup, some good-old fashioned New England astronomers picked out a naked-eye visible nova a few days back. So what if some guy in Portugal saw it first? Well, at least it's not a comet heading this way.
Seriously, it's a real tribute to Hillbilly Science that folks with handmade telescopes are finding important stuff like new stars in the sky before the huge expensive observatories do. Those things have too much to do—like look for ay-leens—to be bothered with the mundane task of findng new stars popping up out of nowhere.
So it's called NOVA AQUILAE 1999 NUMBER 2 and it's been reported as "visual magnitude 5.6" which is a fancy way of saying that if it was any fainter, you'd be out of luck. But it'll be there for sure if you have a low-power pair of binoculars or something.
Why are you reading what I have to say about it?
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