It's fading!!!
On Mon, 19 Sep 2011 22:40:34 GMT, SN 2011fe was at magnitude 10.0!
And hey, Art, that's a nice Bob King image of the end part of the handle of the Big Dipper and M101. The picture is actually in color! At first it's very hard ot miss that it is actually in color, but check out that unmistakable, although subtle, blue halo around Alkaid! :jumping up and down smilie: There is a hint of blue in the halo around Mizar too, but it is even subtler, and rightly so, because Alkaid really is much bluer than Mizar!
Note, too, the one obviously yellow-looking star in this image, the second one from Alcor in "the wiggly path to the supernova" in this image. The yellow star is 83 Ursa Majoris or IQ Ursa Majoris. I like the name, IQ Ursa Majoris! Although my favorite IQ star is IQ Aurigae, a star classified as an A0pSi star which is as blue as a B4 star!
Still, IQ Ursa Majoris is interesting enough. It is classified as a M2III star, so it is really cool and quite bright, too. It is about 300 times the luminosity in yellow-green light, but since a star of spectral class M2 peaks well into the infrared part of the spectrum, the bolometric (total) energy output of this star is likely several thousand times that of the Sun.
It's so much fun to discover that what looked like a black and white image is really a color picture, and then it's even more fun to try to read its colors! :jumping up and down: :jumping up and down:
Ann