(cba:news) V592 Cas... cast it back into the outer darkness

[Joe Patterson]

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).