(cba:news) Stars for October (Joe Patterson) [2010-09-30T20:28:50Z]

Dear CBAers,

Thanks for all the great data you've been sending!  V709 Cas and IGR 
0023+61 are being well-covered - especially from Enrique, Bob Koff, and 
Jim Jones.  I reckon these can be put aside until late in the season.
(V709 Cas, by the way, pulses primarily at its first harmonic - at 552 
c/d - and hence requires pretty fast integrations.)

Many of you jumped promptly on the superoutburst of SDSS0804+51.  And 
rightly so!  Rotten sky position, but with data from Europe (Arto and 
Enrique) and the USA (Bob Kogg, Tut and George), we're managing to track 
its beautiful wave pretty well.  It's likely to be a very important 
star, a very old binary with a greatly whittled-down secondary - and the 
measure of the period is the clue needed to learn the mass.  It might 
have another 2 weeks or so of visibility in our scopes - let's keep 
leaning on it till the photons are gone.

I don't want to sound greedy... but I am.  I had hoped to get some early 
season data on RX0636+35 ("Aur") and RX0704+26 ("Gem").  So far, no 
takers: I think the glamor of sdss0804 blew my request away.  But it 
would be great to get some pulse timings of these stars - and I have 
*immediate" use for Mister Gem, because I have a long-term pulse timing 
study ready to ship out the door (but would be enhanced by 2010 data, 
since it would test the candidate long-term ephemeris).  Gem has a 480 s 
period, but most of the power is at 240 s; and the amplitude is so high 
that your light curves may look funny, as if there some new noise in the 
CCD.  (Fast integrations will reassure you on this.)

And as for late season DQ Her stars, I'd love to see something on 
RX1654-19.  Probably too late, but I thought I'd try.

For the best northern stars for quite long time series, I nominate 
XSS0056+46 and V455 And.  In the south, BW Scl (for sure)... and maybe 
(getting ambitious here) RX0232-37 and RX0354-16.  The latter two are 
faint and kind of mysterious, and hence long shots - but worth getting 
to know.

For those thinking ahead, we will probably have a CBA meeting coincident 
with the AAS meeting in Boston - and with the AAVSO meeting.  Nominally 
May 21-26, 2011.  This would mean skipping the Big Bear meeting. 
Opinions on that?  My guess is that CBAers would prefer the AAS+AAVSO 
setting... but the costs of Boston and the AAS are a problem.

joe