Six-year optical monitoring of the BL Lacertae object 1ES 0806+52.4

We present the results of the first systematic long-term multicolor optical monitoring of the BL Lacertae object 1ES 0806+52.4. The monitoring was performed in multiple passbands with a 60/90 cm Schmidt telescope from 2005 December to 2011 February. The overall brightness of this object decreased from 2005 December to 2008 December but was regained after that. A sharp outburst probably occurred around the end of our monitoring program. Overlapping the long-term trend are some short-term small-amplitude oscillations. No intranight variability was found in the object, which is in accordance with the historical observations before 2005. By investigating the color behavior, we found a strong bluer-when-brighter chromatism for the long-term variability of 1ES 0806+52.4. The total amplitudes at the c, i, and o bands are 1.18, 1.12, and 1.02 mag, respectively. The amplitudes tend to increase toward shorter wavelengths, which may be a major cause of the bluer-when-brighter chromatism. Such bluer-when-brighter chromatisms are also found in other blazars, such as S5 0716+714, OJ 287. The hard-X-ray data collected from the Swift/BAT archive was correlated with our optical data. No positive result was found, the reason for which may be that the hard-X-ray flux is a combination of the synchrotron and inverse Compton emission, but with different timescales and cadences under the leptonic synchrotron self-Compton model.