Recently I found an old article in the former German magazine Interstellarum (Interstellarum 08, pp. 21, 03/1996) that deals with visual observations of nova remnants. In addition to exhibiting O-III lines (which novae typically do), some novae leave behind nova shells or nova remnants as expanding non-stellar matter clouds to be seen with O-III or UHC filters.
The author Ronald Stoyan describes Nova Persei 1901 and Nova Herculis 1934 (DQ Her), whose shells he observed with 14" aperture presumably in the 1990s.
Now this was a quarter century ago and I wonder if some of these nova shells can be observed nowadays. Is this something some of you do?
I have never read a visual observing report about nova remnants in an internet forum. If so, which nova shells can be observed nowadays (and how much aperture is needed)?
Some of the brightest novae that happend since then were Nova Aquilae 1999b (V1494 Aql) and Nova Scorpii 2007 (V1280 Sco) that reached 3.9 mag.
According to this paper there is a bipolar nebula around V1280 Sco with less than an arcsecond diameter in 2011 (but must have been expanding since then). https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/fu...a19825-12.html
I can imagine most of these old remnants observed in the 1990s may be too large and faint nowadays. Or perhaps there were only the two nova shells mentioned in the Interstellarum paper visible for amateurs?
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