[vsnet-chat 1937] Re: Eta Car [vsnet-obs 20855] (fwd) Re: Nova Vel 1999, any prediscovery data?

["William S G Walker" <astroman@voyager.co.nz>]

Hi Peter and Bish,

In the last few days I've reduced some UBV measures of eta Carinae by Harry
Willams. I hadn't worried about sending them on as the tube scale factors
are a little out and I need to do some more work on these. But they're all
within +/- 0.03. Answers are:

			   V	  B-V	  U-B
1999 May 21.3457UT	5.218	0.664	-0.312
        May 24.3565UT	5.184	0.657	-0.296
	
I look at this star myself a lot but I'm not sure that I'd like to do
visual estimates of an object like this. The nebulous background must cause
some sort of contrast effect. Like Peter I can easily see other stars of
similar brightness - 5.2 - but eta is much harder. I put this down to the
bright background. Limit here is better than 6.0 if I put on my driving
glasses but I don't do much visual observing - in fact the recent nova has
been my first for a while! 

As I mentioned a few weeks ago this star has had a few sharp brightenings
since 1970 and has been the subject of a few false alarms. 

Regards,
Stan
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> From: Bish Ishibashi <bish@astro.spa.umn.edu>
> To: vsnet-chat@kusastro.kyoto-u.ac.jp

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