Astronomer’s Telegram #4051
S. Jorstad (Boston Univ., USA and St. Petersburg Univ., Russia), V. Larionov, D. Blinov, D. Morozova, E. Kopatskaya, T. Konstantinova, Yu. Pavlova, A. Mokrushina (St. Petersburg Univ.)
on 18 Apr 2012; 13:31 UT
We perform optical photometric and R-band polarimetric monitoring of FSRQ B2 1156+29 = 4C +29.45 = Ton 599 using 1.8-m Perkins telescope (Az,USA), 70-cm AZT-8 (CrAO, Ukraine) and 0.4-m LX-200 (St.Petersburg, Russia) telescopes, partly in the frames of GASP project. Our data show that starting from 2012 April 2 this blazar entered a phase of violent optical activity. In the night of 2012-04-11 its brightness reached R=15.1, as compared to R=16.6 in the night 2012-04-09. The quasar faded almost to usual level of R=16.7 in subsequent nights, and brightened again to R=15.5 in the night of 2012-04-18UT07:00, becoming 1 magnitude brighter than during previous night. Both optical brightening events were accompanied with increased level of linear polarization ~10%, as compared to usual level of 3-5%. We encourage multi-wavelength observations of B2 1156+29.