Rapid Optical Flaring of the Quasar 1308+326
ATel #12898; Thomas J. Balonek, Miguel De Los Santos, Daniel Dougherty, Fairuz Ishraque, Joshua Liberman, John Slater (Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY, USA)
on 29 Jun 2019; 06:00 UT
Credential Certification: Thomas J. Balonek (tbalonek@colgate.edu)
Subjects: Optical, AGN, Blazar, Quasar
We report observations of a rapid optical flare in the blazar 1308+326 (z=0.997), reaching R ~15.26 on JD 2458662.6 [2019 June 28.1 UT] - four magnitudes brighter than its historic minimum.
The average brightness is calculated from several two-minute images taken in a sequence lasting about forty-five minutes. Photometric errors from individual images range from 0.03 to 0.1 magnitudes, depending on the object brightness and sky conditions. On June 28, no significant variation was observed over two-and-a-half hours.
Our preliminary photometric results, using comparison star C (R = 13.28) of Smith et al (1985, AJ, 90, 1184), are presented below.
2019-06-24.1 UT (JD 2,458,658.6) R=16.74 ± 0.10
2019-06-26.1 UT (JD 2,458,660.6) R=15.92 ± 0.10
2019-06-27.1 UT (JD 2,458,661.6) R=15.64 ± 0.05
2019-06-28.1 UT (JD 2,458,662.6) R=15.26 ± 0.05
Observations were obtained with the Colgate University Foggy Bottom Observatory (Hamilton, NY) 0.4-m Ferson telescope equipped with an FLI PL1001 CCD camera. Student research participation at Colgate University is supported by the Justus '43 and Jayne Schlichting Student Research Fund and the Science and Math Initiative (SMI).
We encourage multi-wavelength observations of this outburst.
