Follow-up phot. & sp. of 12 PGIR novae

The rate has been previously estimated to be in the range of ~10-300yr^-1^, either based on extrapolations from a handful of very bright optical novae or the nova rates in nearby galaxies; both methods are subject to debatable assumptions.

The total discovery rate of optical novae remains much smaller (~5-10/yr) than these estimates, even with the advent of all-sky optical time-domain surveys. Here, we present a systematic sample of 12 spectroscopically confirmed Galactic novae detected in the first 17 months of Palomar Gattini-IR (PGIR), a wide-field near-infrared time-domain survey. Operating in the J band (~1.2{mu}m), which is significantly less affected by dust extinction compared to optical bands, the extinction distribution of the PGIR sample is highly skewed to a large extinction values (>50% of events obscured by A_V_>~5mag).