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A few days ago the star RS Ophiuchi exploded.
*No, that occurred a long time ago and we're just now seeing its light. But moving on...
Not the whole star, just some material dumped onto it by a neighboring red giant. The resulting nuclear conflagration is visible to the naked eye--barely--in the constellation Ophiuchus just before dawn: sky map. Astrophotographer John Chumack snapped this picture of RS Ophiuchi on Feb. 16th
Normally RS Ophiuchi would be indistinguisable from the scatter of dim background stars in this image, but as a nova, it stands out front and center. The explosion multiplied RS Ophiuchi's brightness by a factor of 1700--from magnitude 12.5 to 4.5. "But, cautions Chumack, "the nova is fading now, currently at mag 5.3, so get out and take a look [before it disappears]."
It'd be visible in the SE/S. Can see Ophiuchus in this sky map (pre-dawn).
From spaceweather.com
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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