Willem Jan Drijfhout alerted me that there was a new object in M51 as of January. I assumed it was a supernove but it turns out to be something more interesting - an Intermediate-Luminosity Red Transient. These are temporarily brightened stars with luminosites between novae and supernovae. Interestingly, they exhibit a reddish color that I seem to have picked up.
"Intermediate-luminosity red transients (ILRTs) are a new class of optical transients. They have maximum luminosities between novae and SNe, and outbursts lasting several months, becoming cool, dusty, and extremely red as the eruptions proceed. Their outbursts may be due to catastrophic stellar collisions and mergers. "
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014hst..prop13851BThis object has several designations:
"We present the discovery of an optical transient (OT) in Messier 51, designated M51 OT2019-1 (also ZTF 19aadyppr, AT 2019abn, ATLAS19bzl), by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF). The OT rose over 15 days to an observed plateau luminosity of $M_r=-13$, in the luminosity gap between novae and supernovae (SNe)."
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9r8010twWhat great luck that I decided to add to my data library on M51 at just the right time!
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