This nova was already the second in 1999 in the constellation Aquila. A Potuguese amateur astronomer discovered the nova on 01 December 1999. One or two days later I received an e-mail announcing this discovery. At that time we had bad weather in northern Germany. Obersavations told me that the nova had much brightened and should be brighter than 4 mag and easily spottable with the naked eye. On 05 December 1999 I was lucky. The clouds disappeared and were still away when darkness came. I decided not to drive to our observation site but to take a picture from the window of my house near the town center. This could be quicker realised. The mount was roughly polar aligned (without seeing Polars through the ceiling of the room). I used the C5 for guiding and a 135 mm lens mounted piggyback on the C5 for the exposure. Because of the poor polar alignment the corrections were a little bit bigger than normal but at a focal length of 135 mm this was tolerable. There were some more annoying circumstances related to this exposure but nevertheless I was able to take two nice pictures of which one is shown here. The nova (arrow) appears on the print reddish.

Date: 05 December 1999, 18.07h CET

Lens: f=135 mm stopped down to f/2.8

Guiding: manually with C5 at 139x

Exposure time: 10 minutes

Film: Kodak Royal Gold 400

The vertical stripes at the bottom of the pictures originate possibly from straylight from the neighbourhood