V1647 Ori and Mcneil nebula: possible fading? – 24 Oct. 2016
After our first observations of this new season, we looked at V1647 Ori and McNeil Nebula again, to collect new data. The star looked fainter than our previous observations, suggesting the source is finally fading after its several years in bright state, since its 2008 outburst, the second one observed after its discovery in 2004.
V1647 Ori and the McNeil Nebula on 26 Feb., 01 Oct. and 24 Oct. 2016
These new observations indicate that the star is possibly entering the final stage of its very long outburst. At Virtual Telescope Project we monitor this star very regularly and we are starting to carefully review of the data collected over the last years.
The images above come from our archives (details are given on the picture itself) and all of them were remotely taken with the “Elena” (PlaneWave 17″+Paramount ME+SBIG STL-6303E) robotic unit. It is evident that since Feb. 2016 the source faded significantly of 0.6 mag (R mags for the reference stars from UCAC-4).
It is now important to see if this transition will be confirmed and how fast the source will develop in the next weeks, so further observations will be scheduled as soon as the weather will cooperate.
V1647 Ori is an important star, showing a behavior resembling both the rare FU Ori and EX Lup variables, typical pre-main sequence objects.
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