[meteorite-list] LOOK UP! TOO LATE...

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:40:32 -0500
Message-ID: <054b01c8ec5c$b767aaf0$db5de146_at_ATARIENGINE>

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080722-st-star-found.html

The brightest exploding star, or nova, in the last ten
years was discovered by ESA's Xray telescope in
October, 2007, months after it brightened into clear
naked-eye visibility.

The embarassing thing is... nobody saw it. Not one
optical telescope, not one observatory, not any amateur
astronomer, not any sky-weatcher, not even any "nova-
hunter" saw it when it went off on June 5, 2007.

Nobody.

It's taken all this time to track down images of the
nova in automated sky surveys and the like and to
verify it really did take place. It's now named V598
Puppis.

Is anybody looking up? If we can miss a naked-eye
bright nova, what makes anybody think we'd see,
oh, say, a big impactor until two days before?


Sterling K. Webb
Received on Tue 22 Jul 2008 08:40:32 PM PDT