From jop at astro.columbia.edu Mon Nov 5 21:21:23 2001 From: jop at astro.columbia.edu (Joe Patterson) Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2001 21:21:23 -0500 (EST) Subject: (cba:news) Schmeer's funny new star Message-ID: Dear CBAers, Tonny just sent out a message on this guy, a very short period affair! Let's do it - all hemispheres, longitudes, apertures Coords below - Jonathan, can you make a chart? 1RXS J232953.9+062814 (RA = 23h29m54s.30, Dec = +06d28'10".9) Probably about 13-14 mag right now (wild guess) Joe Looks like a real winner - the other fall stars can wait a bit! From jop at astro.columbia.edu Wed Nov 7 15:41:40 2001 From: jop at astro.columbia.edu (Joe Patterson) Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 15:41:40 -0500 (EST) Subject: (cba:news) that mysterious star in Pisces Message-ID: Dear CBAers, Pull out all the stops for that funny new star that Patrick Schmeer found in outburst. It looks destined to become one of our best celestial friends - but who knows when it will come into outburst again. It's reasonably well placed for November, and accessible to both hemispheres. Fire all available weaponry on it! Coords 23 29 54.30 +06 28 10.9 There's a chart in the CBA chart archive. joe From jop at astro.columbia.edu Sat Nov 10 08:03:22 2001 From: jop at astro.columbia.edu (Joe Patterson) Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 08:03:22 -0500 (EST) Subject: (cba:news) V592 Cas... cast it back into the outer darkness Message-ID: Dear CBAers, 11/10/01 Like relief pitchers for the New York Yankees, some stars just have bad days. Tonny and Ed Beshore have been faithfully covering V592 Cas for ~3 weeks now. There's a cute little QPO at 16 minutes, but the superhump of several years ago has vanished (with no change in brightness - the superhump machine of novalikes doesn't pay much attention to brightness). It's a *very* good quality nothing since it's based on many sequential 14-hour runs... but still, as an upper limit it's not as interesting as some other November stars. I recommend we reject V592 Cas for bad behavior. TT Ari continues as a good target for small scopes - good seasonal timing, healthy superhump pulsing away. RX2329+06, the fishy one, is definitely the glamor star up there. It's hanging in pretty well around 15th mag, and the light curve is just about the prettiest in captivity. Sorry for being repititive, but I have to admit to a powerful craving for this star! Finally, up north there's FS Aur, now a very well-placed second object of the night. So far no observations this year from CBAers. FS Aur shows a large-amplitude photometric wave at a period unrelated to, and much longer than, the orbital period. We've never quite seen a thing like this before. Damn good target. I know less about the far-southern stars. We briefly covered EC23593-6724 and EC05114-7955 during Jonathan's recent Chile run, but didn't get enough coverage to learn about periods. Very good opportunity for los CBAers del sur. But I sure hope the southerners won't be scared away by the "+06" part of the address in Pisces - we could *really* use observations from AU/NZ! (And Bob Rea has started - give 'im some help!) joe As most of you know, it's now possible to look up the archive for any of our stars. We're still trying to figure out how to make the data itself available. In the meantime, though, I or Jonathan will be happy to send up to a couple dozen runs on any star you are currently working on... assuming no one has a problem with this policy (if so, please write). From jk at cbastro.org Tue Nov 13 14:29:59 2001 From: jk at cbastro.org (Jonathan Kemp) Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 09:29:59 -1000 (HST) Subject: (cba:news) CBA server maintenance note Message-ID: Hi CBAers, Please note that later today the CBA web/mail/archive server will be undergoing some maintenance as most of the machines in Columbia Physics and Astronomy are changing IP addresses. If you are unable to reach the machine via https://cbastro.org/, please consider trying to contact it at its new IP address of http://128.59.168.162/. Thanks. Jonathan CBA Hilo From jop at astro.columbia.edu Mon Nov 19 09:43:38 2001 From: jop at astro.columbia.edu (Joe Patterson) Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 09:43:38 -0500 (EST) Subject: (cba:news) 2001 Leonids Message-ID: Dear CBAers, I thought some of you might be interested in what happened here in the eastern USA. We have a remote observing site about 50 miles from New York City, and I took 18 Columbia/Barnard students there for a midnight-6 a.m. vigil. Some light cirrus may have been present (it was at sundown and sunrise), but the sky appeared generally quite clear. None of the students had observed meteors before, and the highest on the scale of sky-awareness knew perhaps 3-4 constellations. So this gave me an opportunity to teach some constellations (by berating them to give useful descriptions of where bright meteors appeared). We had a C-8 with us, and the seeing was spectacular - the best I've seen in many years. I couldn't jack up the magnification too much since I was in a public-observing mode, but at 200x the images of Jupiter and Saturn were utterly sharp. This is really unusual for New York! I think none of the students had ever spent a night out-of-doors, and I suspect few had ever spent even an *hour* in a forest at night. This caught me by surprise. It was a somewhat warm night (low of about 40 F), and most students had many layers of clothing (some looked like spheres) plus sleeping bags. Nevertheless, some said they were "incredibly cold". I kept peeling off layers of clothing to meet these emergencies... which turned out fine, since I was kept very busy responding to the other emergency - the bathroom. My advocacy of the sanitary facilities of the outdoors was distinctly unpopular, so everyone used the toilet even though there was no water in it (turned off to avoid freezing pipes). So I kept driving down the road to bring back water buckets and keep the toilet and the humans happy. Oh yeah... the meteors. Between 1 and 4 a.m. the rate seemed to rise steadily, from ~100 to 300 per hour. From then till dawn, the meteors just *burst* out of the sky. We took 10 minute counts, because it was so difficult to count them. There was the expected confusion with rookie observers ("wait, I think I read my watch wrong"... "I thought *you* were keeping the time") - but between 5 a.m. and dawn, we were counting at a rate between 1300 and 1600 meteors per hour. We did a group count, violating all the rules of course... it worked well for us, because we all worked together and became aware of the system for counting. We were not strategized to maximize the count by any means, because nearly everyone was looking generally from the SE to the SW, from Leo through Taurus, just because it was the prettiest part of the sky. Individually, I was seeing about 60% of the counted meteors (standing up; since I had given away my bag and most of my clothes, I was roaming around a lot). That's about it for my report. I'm sure CBAers would be interested in hearing yours! And by the way, I'm grateful to those of you that kept the faith (on RX2329+06 and FS Aur at least) on our CVs during all the meteor excitement. joe