AAVSO: Special Notice #6


The recurrent nova RS Oph appears to be in a very rare outburst, as seen by the
following AAVSO observations:

FEB 13.1631  2453779.6631    4.8   Visual   RWG  Wolfgang Renz, Germany
FEB 10.2100  2453776.71      11.0  Visual   GRL  Bjorn Granslo, Norway
FEB 08.2493  2453774.7493    10.9  Visual   GZN  Alfredo Gonzales-Herrera, Spain

The outburst was first detected by Kiyotaka Kanai (Gunma,Isezaki-shi) and Hiroaki
Narumi (Ehime,Kita-gun) and reported to the VSNet-Alert mailing list.

This is the first outburst of RS Oph in 21 years! It last peaked on January 28,
1985 at magnitude 5.4. The first stage of the decline then lasted 38 days and it
declined at an average rate of 0.1 magnitudes per day. Within 111 days it had
returned to its normal state.

Visual, PEP and CCD observations are needed. Please submit observations to the
AAVSO as 1744-06 RS Oph.

AAVSO charts from A-D scale and a Henden B,V photometry file are available at the
following URL. These charts were released in the past couple of years so please make
sure you are them and not using older AAVSO charts.

http://www.aavso.org/cgi-bin/searchcharts3.pl?name=rs%20oph

RS Oph is located at R.A. 17:50:13 Decl. -06:42.5 (2000). An in-depth discussion
of RS Oph is available via the AAVSO web site at the following URL:

http://www.aavso.org/vstar/vsots/0500.shtml

This special notice was compiled by: A. Price.
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