CI AQL.

There are about two dozen galactic novae in my repertoire. Some of these are known, or suspected to be recurrent but others lie low as far as we know, once they have done their thing. The only way to tell is to keep observing their fields, night after night, month after month, year after year. One of these is RR Pic, which I mentioned some time back. This is the star which R Watson of Beaufort West saw when walking to work one early morning in 1925. I have watched it well over a thousand times and never a peep out of it. Dull work, you may say and so it would be if you were paid to do it. Amateurs have a different approach - whenever one points the telescope at an old nova, one's heartbeat quickens a little and one thinks "Tonight's the night (maybe)".

CI Aquillae was found to be in outburst on 1917 June 25 on a Heidelberg patrol plate. Little was known of the star because it was not observed visually at the time. Then, on 2000 April 28 it showed up on a photo taken by Minoru Yamamoto of Aichi, Japan. Minoru alerted the astronomical community promptly and the star has been intensively studied, photometrically and spectroscopically in the last ten days. It shows interesting variations which point to a compound system. It is still at magnitude 9 and is well within the reach of Canopus readers.

My German colleague Patrick Schmeer tells me that he had already decided to add CI Aql to his repertoire when the Email news of Minoru's discovery arrived. Patrick is the amateur who, to my chagrin, discovered the U Sco outburst on a night when Edenvale had cloud. He was actually on holiday, away from his observatory and made the discovery using binoculars. Now THAT is dedication for you!

Enjoy CI Aql and contact me if you want more data on it or on other old novae.

Danie Overbeek.
Tel 011 453 6918
danieo@global.co.za