Emailed Jeremy Shears to find out the process he went through to discover the outburst of KX Aql and here is his reply.
One of my variable star programmes is to monitor cataclysmic variables (CVs) for outbursts. The targets are stars on the BAA VSS Recurrent Objects Programme, CVs from the Hamburg Quasar Survey highlighted by Dr Boris Gaensicke at Warwick University, plus a number of CV candidates identified from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. I started observing at about 21.45 UT on the evening of Friday 25 May, which was shortly after dusk. It was a pretty transparent night, with a limiting magnitude in the low 17s in most part of the sky; the telescope is a Takahashi FS102 fluorite refractor mounted on a Gemini G41 mount and the CCD detector is a Starlight Xpress SXV-M7. I patrolled through to about 23.00 UT when some banks of cloud stopped me for about 20 mins, however after that conditions once again improved. My 50th star to be patrolled that night (and the 710th since the beginning of May) was KX Aql. I have visited this field many times, but have never seen KX. It’s actually a delightful field: very rich in stars of all brightnesses. When the image appeared on the computer screen at 00.18 UT I immediately saw KX was present in outburst. Continuing to capture images, I did a quick photometric measurement using AIP4Win and found it to be at 14.1C (C = “clear”, i.e. the CCD was unfiltered). Recognising the importance of the outburst I went inside and reported it on the BAAVSS-alert and CVnet-outburst user groups. I managed to get 2 hours of photometry before local dawn interfered (it arrives early at this time of year). So I shut up shop and went to bed. Photometric analysis the next afternoon revealed a stead brightening of KX during the observing period from 14.1 to 13.8C
Congrats Jeremy on the discovery.
Regards
