Earlier we collaborated with a Chinese amateur astronomer, Mr. Jingyuan Zhao, to launch a campaign to look for novae in M31 using our CDK20. Every night when the weather is good, we took a 5-minute exposure with the R filter and another one with the V filter. (When there is moon, we increased to 10 minutes to compensate the brighter sky background.) We did this in 30 nights between late August and early November 2023. We found six new stellar objects in M31, and became the first ones to report five of them. Some of them should be nova, judging from their light curves. Some others have slower brightness change so they may be other classes of variable stars. To confirm their nature, we need spectroscopic followup observations, but unfortunately this campaign does not have a spectroscopic component. So precisely speaking, all new objects we found are just nova "candidates." Our discovery reports for the five new objects are:
https://www.wis-tns.org/object/2023tmh?fbclid=IwAR3uE-OBpkJ6---LQKKFdg6l-cuSIt1OpuPbIcU2rSPmaAnCxMGEQ9WAzkghttps://www.wis-tns.org/object/2023vpw?fbclid=IwAR0dLbDse4WVzAPxbnp3LBDhPvhvbTQuLe_klFVM4ocg3iwlopbs37ElEBUhttps://www.wis-tns.org/object/2023wck?fbclid=IwAR2GNg0UHVxWQw383MrNetnunY-2J_ssWCPnzZcqmeXjWObJRoS4-QMV8wQhttps://www.wis-tns.org/object/2023wot?fbclid=IwAR0jxXaRv0rud-Xp4QPECdO9-DIhuj2k47_-Fx9VIqrzuow7_qpcmVCimFQhttps://www.wis-tns.org/object/2023wrj?fbclid=IwAR3CAYXy3b3BBk1kAGbrMeGZwpdki0h8ZrerjQnv1Bjz3AHRt4UIZ5e7k64After we finished this campaign on Nov 3, we have accumulated 2.5 hr (equivalent) of exposures at R and V each. So I decided to spend some time to collect L, B, Ha and OIII as well, just to create some pretty pictures. The picture here is the result. It's an LHOORGB composition. The L exposures were taken under excellent seeing (about 1"). So there are some fine details if you look at the full-resolution image.
Rev.B: The five new stellar objects in M31 discovered by us are marked in this version, provided by Jingyuan.
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