September 1st Waiting for the sky to darken - a quick image of  M57 - the Ring Nebula September 13th Poor sky conditions with full Moon made observing difficult. The first M31 image came in at UT 19:45:36 with a background level at 24925. A decent image has background <9000. Blinking with a reference image showed nothing - the image core washed out the most important areas to scan. The subtraction method also failed due to the huge difference in reference and image levels so I resorted to the old fashioned 'search by eye'. There was a promising object to the North of the core. I emailed Kamil Hornoch in the Czech Republic - had he seen anything? There was no response and the second image came in which confirmed the presence of a new object. I then checked the TNS page - nothing reported and then I checked TCOP. There was a report of an object at that location on an image taken 59 minutes prior to mine. An 'H' at the end of the report suggested that Kamil Hornoch had indeed spotted the object. I was now registered to post on TCOP and made my first report - a confirmation report - it did not include my name so a second report was hastily added. I sent an image to Kamil, Allen Shafter and David Bishop with astrometric coordinates and magnitude estimate: Allen and Kamil posted an ATEL - unfortunately before seeing my post. However, I was later credited with independent discovery on David Bishop's page: 28th September A team using the giant 8.1metre Gemini North telescope in Hawaii obtained a sepctrum - the object is a nova.