(cba:news) XZ Eri erupts

[Joe Patterson]

Dear CBAers,

Rod Stubbings reports that XZ Eri is at 15.0 - an eruption.  It remains to
be seen whether this is a supermax, but XZ Eri has never been seen with
time-series photometry in *any* kind of eruption, and it's a star of prime
interest since it has deep eclipses (the eclipses selectively cover
various parts of the wd+disk+hot-spot, so offer diagnostics that
noneclipsing stars don't).  So it's a very, very tempting target!

I've just got out to AZ, and the sky is very clear and dark.  Last night
we got a good run on BG CMi, to match up with the runs at other longitudes
(Messier, Bolt, Rea).  Nevertheless with the big scope we can get very
good light curves at high time resolution, so we'll do XZ Eri as the first
object of every night for the next several nights.  If you can do it, it
would be awfully nice to get something from AU/NZ (and Berto said he'd
also cover it if clouds ever go away).

Nevertheless, this is absolute prime BG CMi season too, and I hope that
many of you will keep that vigil up.  We're hoping to leave it to smaller
telescopes in the USA, and rely on other longitudes to make the study the
best possible accounting for this star!


   joe


what a treat to see the night sky again!!!