Zombie Star

 

T Coronae Borealis, 35 mm lens 

Have you been following this one? Yeah, for Halloween, the news media called it the "Zombie Star," but over the past 6 months, you may have seen headlines where it was billed as a "recurring nova" or "T CrB" (T Coronae Borealis). Sensationalist writers may have said something like, "Nova set to light up the skies," but that's not true. The star will not be bright enough to do that. It'll be visible to your unaided eye, though, if your night sky isn't harmed too much by city lights. 

Now I could waste your time here by giving you all the info on the Zombie Star, but you may as well look up "T Coronae Borealis" on Wikipedia and get it straight from the horse's mouth. My only goal for this post is to show you exactly where T CrB is located, and to say that, as of this writing, the star has not yet brightened to its predicted "nova" magnitude of roughly 2nd magnitude. So you haven't missed it.

Recurring novae are tough because they take so long to erupt and reach their maximum brightness. They really try your patience. This one, T CrB, or sometimes referred to as the "BlazeStar," takes a lifetime! And it is particularly problematic because when it reaches its maximum brightness, it will be for a very short time, on the order of a day, or so. Thus, it could erupt during daylight hours for your location, and then if you have a night or two of cloudy skies, you could miss it altogether. However, if you're the type who can take pictures through your telescope, you may be able to capture T CrB before it dims back to its normal 10th magnitude. As long as you can shoot it within a few weeks of its burst to maximum.

There is another problem with T CrB, however, and that is it is slowly sinking in the west after sundown and will remain quite low in the sky as it shifts to the morning sky. Due to its low altitude (where it can be obscured by trees and nearby buildings), we may have to capture its max brightness with only a camera and lens on a tripod. If you haven't already done so, I recommend that you go out with a camera and tripod on the next clear night and get a good shot of the Northern Crown, or Corona Borealis, as a reference for when it finally flares up. The photo at the top of this page was my own attempt to create a reference image of T CrB with a camera lens, because all my other reference images of it were taken through my telescope.

(Update (2024-12-08): T CrB is no longer visible in the evening sky. If you want to follow it, you'll have to get up early in the morning. The star is well above the NW horizon by 5 AM. As of this date, it is still shining at minimum brightness.)

If you've researched T CrB, then you may know that it reaches a maximum brightness of magnitude 2 (similar in brightness to the star Alphecca in the above photo) about every 80 years. Although astronomer Bradley Schaefer built a case for the nova to occur between April and September of 2024 (both of which have come and gone), the two previous observations of T CrB at max brightness were on May 12, 1866 and February 9, 1946. That's less than 80 years apart, but still slightly longer than Schaefer's prediction. To be precise, it's 79 years and 273 days. Using no other reasoning than the period determined by the previous two sightings, we can expect the BlazeStar to erupt on November 9, 2025.

Given that its maximum brightness lasts only for a day or two, and that we have only two previous sightings to work with, we still don't know with any certainty when T CrB will achieve its BlazeStar status in our times. We can only say that it will likely occur sometime between now and November of 2025. And that means that if any of us wants to see it for ourselves, we need to go out there and look at T CrB on every clear night. Either that or pay close attention to the astronomy news and watch the headlines for T CrB, the Zombie Star.

I've been shooting T CrB through my telescope for a year or more. The field of view is much narrower than that of a typical camera lens. Should the Zombie star erupt during the next month or two, I will not be able to get it with the telescope and will have to settle for a shot with the 35 mm camera lens. So I had to do a comparison of my telescope and Atik camera image with my Canon EOS 6D camera and 35mm lens image, and figure out what the 10th magnitude Zombie star looks like in each. You might be wondering the same thing, so below is the result.

Telescope FOV (left) is indicated by dashed
lines (right); north is up in both images.


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