Searching for New Variable Stars: an Educational Project to Mine Archival Data

Details Searching for New Variable Stars: an Educational Project to Mine Archival Data Searching for New Variable Stars: an Educational Project to Mine Archival Data

Dec 1998

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1998aas...193.3405w&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, 193rd AAS Meeting, #34.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 30, p.1293

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

As a Senior Seminar project,. three students were each assigned a night of images of a field containing a variable star observed under our eclipsing binary photometry program. Each field was eight arc-minutes square, with the images coming from the DFM 32-inch telescope at our Dark Sky Observatory. The exposures used a Photometrics CH250 camera with a Tektronix 1024(2) CCD and V-filter. Darks were obtained throughout the night, as well as sky flats at dusk or dawn. The fields were around the systems V442 Cas, WW Cyg, and V345 Lac. The students used Axiom Research's MIRA AP software for doing the aperture photometry, using one initial coordinates file for all of the reasonably bright stars in the field. This number varied from about 60 to almost 200 stars. The MIRA software is easy to use, with auto-centroiding and calibration built in, so it was just a matter of loading images and applying the calibration. One of the student/authors (BDW) wrote an application in Microsoft Visual BASIC to scan the output data files and produce new files, per star. These data sets were examined using PSI-Plot, to look for variability. Errors due to occasional drift led to centroiding problems, a lesson in itself! There were still some residual variations in a few stars that may be real. Follow-up observations will be made to verify these suspicions.

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