New Forest Observatory ®

Panic over.  It is not an alien race trying to get our attention (shame) – but an extremely variable, variable star!  This little beauty is WY Cas lying just below the open cluster NGC7789 in Cassiopeia, and Noel created the animation from two separate images taken over a year apart.  Continue reading →

Noel has just processed a Sky 90/M25C image of an open cluster.  We had already imaged the same cluster a couple of years earlier with the Hyperstar 1 and SXV-H9C.  One very faint very red star of around magnitude 13 shows up as a bright orange magnitude 7 star in the latest data.  We have identified the star as a variable which may undergo mag 2 variations – but a 6 mag change is a bit steep by anyone’s standards!  We are looking into this a bit deeper and have sent the data to an expert at the BAA.  Watch this space.  New discovery?  Quite possibly 🙂