Having seen the pictures of Kevin Morefield (
https://www.astrobin.com/403558/?nc=all) and Willem Jan Drijfhout (
https://www.astrobin.com/403322/?nc=all), I decided to post my observation of an Intermediate-Luminosity Red Transient discovered this year (2019).
Here, I present an animation made of pictures I took in 2018 and 2019.
Given the fact that it is an animated gif, the image quality is lower than in my other pictures of M51, but this doesn't affect the clear visibility of the ILRT.
The animation is built up of two pairs of pictures; one is made of inverted greyscale pictures wheras the other pair is the colored version of the previous ones. The ILRT can be clearly seen as a small orange dot and thus should not be that difficult to discover by yourself ;-)!
This is the reason why I didn't use any markers in the picture.
If you are interested in more details of this phenomenon, here is an excerpt of the summary of the publication of the group which discovered the ILRT:
"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 Mr=−13, in the luminosity gap between novae and supernovae (SNe). The spectral sequence shows a red continuum, prominent Balmer emission with a velocity width of ≈400 km s−1, Ca II and [Ca II] emission, and absorption features (Ca II H+K, Na I D, O I 7774 Å blend) characteristic of an F-type supergiant spectrum. The properties of spectra and multi-band light curves are similar in many ways to the so-called "SN impostors" and intermediate-luminosity red transients (ILRTs)."
See also:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.07857https://britastro.org/node/17511
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