The blazar S4 0954+65: the abnormal flare in November-December
ATel #16380; V. V. Vlasyuk, O. I. Spiridonova, A. S.Moskvitin, O. A.Maslennikova (Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Rus. Ac. Sci.)
on 15 Dec 2023; 08:18 UT
Credential Certification: Alexander Moskvitin (mosk@sao.ru)
Subjects: Optical, Blazar
Referred to by ATel #: 16388
We continued monitoring of the blazar S4 0954+65 since its last activity epoch at 2023 October, as it was presented by us in ATel #16331. The both our (1-meter and 0.5-meter) small reflectors were used within observing company.
Due to bad weather conditions along last November we did not make it's brightness measurements after maximum R=13.22 at epoch MJD=60259. Our first observations at December 5th gave very close value R~13.40. But 3 days after brightness of S4 0954+658 increased to year's maximum at R=13.08 mag at December 8/9 (MJD=60287.05). The error of our estimate is about 0.01 mag. Our following studies showed that brightness of the blazar is still over R=13.5 mag yet.
So we can conclude that this object undergoing extremely high state within 40 days. This fact is very unusual for this interesting flaring blazar --- it's typical behavior consists of series of fast flares, as it was pointed out in our last paper (Vlasyuk et al, Astrophys.Bulletin,2023,v78,N4).
Some signs of intraday variability in S4 0954+658 were detected and will be presented after more accurate data reduction.
The most of data were taken under good weather condition (seeing better 2 arcsec and normal transparency) and have typical accuracy about 0.01 mags. The worse accuracy (up to 0.02 mags) is explaining by bright Moon sky and some mediocre weather in course of some nights.
We strongly encourage further multi-wavelength studies.
