(cba:news) cba august targets del norte, mainly

[Joe Patterson]

Dear CBAers,

Lots of great data coming in this month!  WZ Sge, Cep 1, and FO Aqr are 
getting really good coverage, for which I'm grateful.  Bill Goff has 
apparently got that cloudless CA weather machine going.  I had forgotten 
to mention V592 Her last message, which maybe is why our campaign on 
that star is a little weaker - plenty enough to keep cycle count (the 
most critical thing) but not yet enough to parse fine structure in the 
superhumps - which could reveal the elusive Porb.  So it's worth saying:
V592 Her continues to be a fine and important target, as long as you can 
still get good data on it.

On the other hand, Hercules is a fading enterprise... and it's quite 
possible that patching together 3-hour runs, even a lot of them, may 
prove insufficient.  Since long runs on (almost) any star are greatly 
preferred, you might want to forget Hercules and concentrate on some 
other excellent August targets.  It's kind of an all-in or all-out 
situation... take yer pick.

The coverage on FO Aqr and AO Psc is superb, and we can suspend those 
stars until roughly October.  Thanks to Tut and George for all those 
great runs!  I'd love to see more and longer runs on WZ Sge and Cep 1... 
and would like to revive OT2138+26 (the bright optical transient in 
Pegasus during May 2010).  If the star is now at quiescence, that would 
be great, since we've been waiting for that... and if it's still ravaged 
by superhumps, well that would be mighty interesting too!

Partially due to XMM1151-62, I'm inspired to raise our effort on the 
recent "old novae"... and that means V4743 Sgr and V1494 Aql.  Both of 
these are faint, kind of hard to do, but they both contain - or recently 
contained - strong supersoft X-ray sources which should endow their 
light curves with nice periodic signals.  OK, maybe not that nice, with 
the stars being so faint... but periodic signals nonetheless.  See if 
you can get 'em when you get a break from Moon, clouds, and other 
potential hazards.

joe