A systematic search for novae in M31 on a large set of digitized archival Schmidt plates
M. Henze (1,2), H. Meusinger (1), W. Pietsch (2) ((1) Thueringer, Landessternwarte Tautenburg, (2) Max-Planck-Institut fuer extraterrestrische, Physik)

TL;DR
This study systematically searched for optical novae in M31 using 36 years of digitized archival Schmidt plates, discovering new candidates, confirming known ones, and highlighting the potential of old plate archives for nova research.
Contribution
It introduces an automated method for detecting novae in digitized archival plates and provides a comprehensive database of nova candidates in M31 with precise positions.
Findings
84 nova candidates detected, including 22 new ones
High positional accuracy (~0.4 arcsec) achieved for all candidates
Recurrent nova candidate identified with 30-year interval
Abstract
This paper reports on the detection of optical novae in our neighbour galaxy M31 based on digitized historical Tautenburg Schmidt plates. The accurate positions of the detected novae lead to a much larger database when searching for recurrent novae in M31. We conducted a systematic search for novae on 306 digitized Tautenburg Schmidt plates covering a time span of 36 years from 1960 to 1996. From the database of both ~ 300 000 light curves and about one million detections on only one plate per colour band, nova candidates were efficiently selected by automated algorithms and subsequently individually inspected by eye. We report the detection of 84 nova candidates. We found 55 nova candidates from the automated analysis of the light curves. Among these, 22 were previously unknown, 12 were known but not identified on Tautenburg Schmidt plates before, and 21 novae had been previously…
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