(cba:news) April campaign underway

[Joe Patterson]

Dear CBAers,

Although we are more or less *always* campaigning - like guerilla soldiers
- these two weeks have given us extra leverage over the range of world
longitudes and latitudes.  Jonathan is observing at the 1 m in South
Africa, and Doug Welch is providing quite a bit of data at the 1.9 m in
Australia.  So let's see how things are going...

                         RES AUSTRALIS

AH Men... I think we'll go only ONE more day.  We have forty days now, and
the data are sufficient to reveal the pertinent periods.  Definitely a
quantum improvement on previous results... including a long-baseline
ephemeris for Porb (0.127198 d) and a clarification of the superhumps -
it's primarily a *negative* superhumper, with the nodal frequency present
also (always) and a positive superhumper during one observing season.
After Friday the 13th, we'll quit on this one.

V803 Centauri.  Perfect for all-night coverage now.  Dancing to its little
23-hour tune, with accompanying small superhumps (27 minutes).  Very, very
fine object.

CR Bootis.  Also very well-positioned, decently bright (13.5-14.5) and at
+8 degrees it's available to everybody.  I really hope for contributions
from USA, Europe, and NZ/AU, but so far we've had just a few nibbles.
We last visited CR Boo in 1996, and did OK, but by far the bulk of these
observations came from USA/Chile - not much longitude leverage there!
Kiwis, Yanks, Euros, let the good times (and accompanying
delta-magnitudes) roll!

                         RES BOREALIS

RZ LMI.  Time to bring down the curtain.  It's been a 90-day campaign,
long enough to get whatever we're going to get.  Time to ship off to Jeff
Robertson and Matt Wood, and let them mine for the science.

Leaving just two prime northern objects, DW UMa and CR Boo.

DW UMa.  We're doing well on this star and should keep going another few
weeks.  Nice eclipses and humps to show the neighbors.

CR Boo. See above.  These next 12 days are perhaps the critical time for
this star!

     We have other stars on our program (from the last cba note), but I
just wanted to send a simple list to keep the focus sharp.  Buena suerte!


        joe