The Bright Nova is of course, V1280 Scorpius, which was recently discovered and is thrilling observers with a dramatic brightening.
The Brilliant Deduction is one that I didn't make, and sadly I am paying a high price.
On Friday night, we had a star party for the astroimaging SIG at Steve's Vail View Observatory. The night started out great and I set up two scopes - the refractor for imaging, and the LX200 for some spectrograph work.
Two cameras seemed like a lot to put on a single computer, so I decided to put an old laptop to work on the spectrograph. The computer has some problems, for example it shorts out and randomly shuts down if the battery is left in, but I went ahead and used it anyway. And it performed admirably, collecting data throughout the night with no trouble. This is where a brilliant deduction might have saved me. If a computer is having major problems, well it might not be a good idea to use it at all; and if you do, you'd better save your data to an external disc regularly.
I was pretty excited to be able to get a spectrum for the nova, which didn't rise until shortly before sunrise. The weather took a turn for the worse as high winds kicked up, but I kept pushing along because I really wanted the spectra. I also took the image above with the refractor. Even at 10 second integrations the star was too bright, as evidenced by the blooms (I decided not to remove them). The wind was wreaking havoc and resulted in more than half of the images being smeared as the telescope was being whipped about.
Maybe it was the cold and wind, or maybe my tiredness, but for some reason I neglected to plug in the thumb drive to back up my spectral data after twilight arrived. I just shut things down and packed it home, thinking I would get the data later. BIG Mistake - upon trying to start the computer, I discovered that Windows had become corrupted. I've been trying ever since to get the data - I think it's probably still there - but I'm losing hope that I will ever retrieve it.
So, the moral of the story is, back it up!
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