I've been interested in the late-time characteristics of novae for a long time. Kent Honeycutt and I started a project about a decade ago to look at some old novae in the hopes of finding a few dwarf novae in the bunch; I have hundreds of deep frames surrounding about 30 objects in Sgr/Sco. Someday I will return to that project, maybe with a volunteer or two!
In the meantime, while bringing the AAVSOnet 61cm telescopes on-line, I have been concentrating on getting deep images of more recent novae - say, within the past decade. There are approximately 100 such novae, and I currently have data on about 20 of them. The others will be covered over the next few months. I gave a paper on the current status of this project at the EuroVS meeting this past weekend; Arto Oksansen says that he will post the pdf of my Powerpoint presentation on their web site.
Novae outbursts are typically about 9 magnitudes, and most of the ones discovered reach a peak of V=9-10 or so. This means in quiescence they should be about 18th magnitude, which is not that difficult to do with the typical amateur telescope + CCD of today. So monitoring of old novae is a simple project in which to get involved. As I go along, I'll develop a list of potential candidates for monitoring - those that are reasonably bright and in isolated regions. The typical old nova, of course, sits in the plane of the Milky Way, often in crowded regions like Sagittarius, and therefore very difficult to measure with the crowding. However, there will be plenty of other targets!
Arne
The Arne's presentation can be downloaded from the meeting web-site:
https://www.ursa.fi/english/eurovs-2013/program.html
Also the other presentation can be accessed online.
arto
Hi All
Arne (or anyone else), FM, HS, V999, and V1016 Sgr are a few of the older novae in Sgr that come immediately to mind. John Bortle, as editor of the now long-discontinued AAVSO Circular, included observations of these stars (mostly negatives !) reported by D. Overbeek for years. I think some of them were suspected at the time as perhaps being recurrent on the basis of their (smaller than normal) outburst amplitudes. I'm quite sure there are others, mostly in this (bulge) area.
For sure the true amplitudes of most (or all) of the above mentioned novae were unknown decades ago. Perhaps they remain that way to this day. Does anyone know if any of these post-novae have been positively identified using modern techniques ? Any clear images floating around out there ?
GK Per is of course the most celebrated example of an 'old' classical nova showing other kinds of outburst behavior long after the nova event has subsided but there are other, less well known and less well observed activity occuring in other old novae. Q Cyg, WY Sge, HR Lyr, and V841 Oph come to mind. T Aur, V Per, V1059 Sgr, and the relatively bright DI Lac may not be doing much right now, or are they ?
Fantastic group of variables !
ocn