(cba:news) Maxie and other things

[Joe Patterson]

Hi CBAers,

Thanks to Lew and Doug for airing the threats to the continued life of 
WWV/WWVH.  The WWV broadcasts are more or less what started me in 
astronomy. I had seen an aurora, and wanted to know how I could see 
more.  I was told that you had to listen to WWV for "geophysical 
alerts"... and since it (and all the stations in its vicinity) broadcast 
only in Morse code, I decided to learn Morse code.  Then decided I might 
as well become a ham, got a license, etc.  Sign the petition!

Plus I always liked to listen for the leap second on December 31.  Then 
got curious about leap seconds... leading on to the rest of life.

On to stars du jour.  The campaigns on VW Hyi and the various polars are 
over.  I'll write later about what came out - mainly from the hard X-ray 
observation.  But we have active campaigns on various seasonally 
appropriate *intermediate* polars, and it's time to ramp those up, as 
Maxie (ASASSN-18ey) has been sucking up all the oxygen.  See below.

But Maxie is still a viable target, and will be for ~6 more weeks. 
People are still getting great-quality V-band photometry at 13.4 mag, 
but unfortunately not as *many* people.  So it's getting hard to extract 
maxima/minima from its 17-hour wave.  That wave was a superhump, but 
could now possibly be an orbital signal, depending on its stability and 
waveform.  We need more intense coverage to answer that question, which 
is an important one!  V-band is best, don't fret time resolution as the 
17-hour wave is *leisurely*!  Do fret length of run, though; at 17 
hours, short runs are hard to work with.  3 hours or more is a good rule 
of thumb.

IPs (DQ Her stars) can tolerate short observation, but all CBA targets 
greatly profit from length of run.  This is because all CVs are subject 
to erratic flickering on all time scales - so short runs are *easily* 
bedevilled by flickering.  Anyway, here's the current CBA MOST WANTED 
list for IPs:

AO Psc
V1223 Sgr
V2306 Cyg
V2069 Cyg
FO Aqr
V1033 Cas

joe p
MU Cam

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