From jop at astro.columbia.edu Sat Jan 4 07:23:57 2025 From: jop at astro.columbia.edu (Joe Patterson) Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2025 07:23:57 -0500 Subject: (cba:news) IPs, and a few novae, galore Message-ID: Hi CBAers, As soon as I recede somewhat from minding CBA business (handing off to Matt Wood), the volume of CBA time series zooms upward! I'm in better shape now, and can pay closer attention to all the work you guys are doing - but definitely need a lot of help paying close attention to individual stars. Here's what I suggest: (1) Select your favorites - stars which are well suited for you, by virtue of brightness, sky/seasonal position... and concentrate on them. A few dozen of your quality observations might well define the periodic behavior for the year - especially if non-USA observations (and/or slightly off-season ones)chip in too. (2) Consider doing a preliminary analysis: delete bad/noisy points, and add heliocentric correction. And (this is what I usually do, but obviously it blinds you to very-low-frequency signals). (3) For long-ish runs, subtract the mean magnitude. If the star trends upward/downward throughout your, it's hard to say what you should do. Just report it, I guess. (4) As many of you know, filter choice doesn't matter much. (5) I usually reduce each night to a .hz format - meaning heliocentric-corrected and zeroed. That way, many nights with multiple observers can be made compatible. This is all mainly for IPs. For novae, the actual magnitude matters more. More on that later. joe patterson ____________________________________________________________ Center for Backyard Astrophysics (CBA) mailing lists https://cbastro.org/communications/mailing-lists/