(cba:news) stars for the road

[Joe Patterson]

Dear CBAers,

Tomorrow morning I leave Bio2 for New York City again, so I'll be
incommunicado for maybe a week.  Here's the latest status...

1. V803 Cen: time to end the season's work.  A pretty good season!
Paper reporting the earlier work in May 2000 PASP - pretty consistent with
this year's behavior.

2. V603 Aql: somewhat disappointing.  Cap'n Bob has been hitting it hard,
but so far not the help from other longitudes that I had hoped for.  The
main characteristic, though, is fairly clear: only a positive superhump
this year.  This makes it a less shiny toy - we can't watch the interplay
of the two superhumps.  Unless some of the New Zealanders have been
hitting it hard, I'd say this one should retire in favor of the other
nova in Aquila.

3. V1494 Aql: Wow.  A very, very complex power spectrum in this guy!  We
absolutely need multi-longitude coverage, and as much as possible.  This
is going to be a very rewarding target - some really novel astrophysics
likely to be at work for such a bright object - and is absolutely
accessible to the humblest of scopes.  This will surely be one of our best
campaigns of the year, go as soon as you can and as long as you can.
By the way I see a fairly big peak around 7.4 c/d, so I imagine this is 
the fundamental frequency; but the power spectrum is complex, so we need
your data to figure it out.

4. Our program to measure timings in DQ Her stars continues apace.  FO
Aqr, AO Psc, V1223 Sgr, V709 Cas are the stars in season.

5. HP Lib season is over too.  Very fine season, thanks to the Kiwis
mostly.


     joe