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According to the data, Betelegeuse reached its minimum brightness between Feb. 12th and 14th, and now it is slowly brightening again.

This development was actually predicted. Ed Guinan and Richard Wasatonic of Villanova University recently suggested that Betelgeuse might "bounce back" within a week of Feb. 21st.
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theropod_V_2.0 wrote:The star needs to hold off until the Webb is up and running. Between the Hubble, the Webb and ground based observatories we could really suck some data out of a supernova.

The Fall and Rise in Brightness of Betelgeuse

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As mentioned above, the star subsequently dimmed to ~1.6 mag during mid-February 2020. Observations of all kinds continue to be needed to understand the nature of this unprecedented dimming episode and what this surprising star will do next.

newolder wrote:Betelgeuse is now the faintest it has been in the last 25 years of observation. The behaviour is described in ATEL #13337 (Astronomer's tele message).

The Fainting of the Nearby Red Supergiant Betelgeuse

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Betelgeuse and Antares are the two nearest red supergiant core-collapse Type-II supernova (SN II) progenitors. Photometry from this season shows the star has been declining in brightness since October 2019, now reaching a modern all-time low of V = +1.12 mag on 07 December 2019 UT. Betelgeuse undergoes complicated quasi-periodic brightness variations with a dominant period of ~420 +/-15 days. But also Betelgeuse has longer-term (5 - 6 years) and shorter term (100 - 180 days) smaller brightness changes. Currently this is the faintest the star has been during our 25+ years of continuous monitoring and 50 years of photoelectric V-band observations.

... more @ link

Oxyaena wrote:...

Last thing I heard was that Betelgeuse's been flaring up in brightness again, ie the dimming's not as extreme as it was, it's going back up in luminosity again. I`m relying on memory of course, so I may be wrong about this. Feel free to correct me if I am.

newolder wrote:It's still on a path to going pop!

Betelgeuse: Nearby 'supernova' star's dimming explained
By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website
29 June 2020

Astronomers say big cool patches on a "supergiant" star close to Earth were behind its surprise dimming last year.
Red giant stars like Betelgeuse frequently undergo changes in brightness, but the drop to 40% of its normal value between October 2019 and April 2020 surprised astronomers.

Researchers now say this was caused by gigantic cool areas similar to the sunspots seen on our own parent star.

There had been speculation that Betelgeuse was about to go supernova.

But the star instead began to recover and by May 2020 it was back at its original brightness.

... more @ link above

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V magnitudes are reported for 3 STEREO-A rolls: 2020 June 24.12 UT, V= 0.66 +/-0.015; 2020 July 13.87 UT, V=0.76 +/-0.015; 2020 July 20.54 UT, V=0.80+/-0.015. Here the V-magnitudes are means and errors are the standard deviation of the individual measurements that include transformation uncertainties. Surprisingly, instead of continuing to increase or level off in brightness, Betelgeuse has decreased by ~0.5 mag from mid-May to mid-July. Spanning the STEREO observations, the star dimmed at a rate of 5 mmag/day. The decrease in brightness over 26 days between our first and third observation is comparable to the photometric behavior in late October 2018, and slower than the faster decline, between October 22 and November 10 2019, that marked the beginning of the historic Great Fainting event in February 2020. The next 'minimum' according to the 420-430 d periodicity is predicted to occur in early April 2021. If this current decline continues, another dimming event may occur much earlier. However, Betelgeuse has (not-well understood) complex light variations and it is difficult to make predictions. It will be important to continue to follow Betelgeuse closely through 2020/21.

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