Re: fun with coadding images on Disk Set 19

["Dirk Terrell" <terrell@boulder.swri.edu>]

On Wed, 17 Oct 2001 11:36:04 -0700, aah@nofs.navy.mil wrote:

>  So I suggested to Tom to sit on one field longer rather than
>trying to scan an entire declination strip.  The advantage is that
>you can study short time scale phenomena:  eclipsing systems,
>delta Scuti stars, RR Lyrs, etc.  ROTSE may have discovered most
>of the variables down to ~13th magnitude, but they don't have very
>good light curves.  Don't worry about running the risk of
>only measuring previously well studied objects; they are *not*
>well studied.

Amen to that. From an analysis point of view, the ROTSE curves are not
of much use other than a rough classification to look for potentially
(astrophysically) interesting systems. 

I see a couple of ways TASS can make unique contributions to the
binaries field: (1) high-quality, multi-epoch data on systems that have
variable light curves outside the eclipse/reflection/ellipsoidal
variation (e.g. Algols with mass transfer events, W UMa systems doing
who knows what) and (2) long-period, detached binaries (95+% of the
light curve is flat so they're not easily found unless you look for
them often over an extended period of time). The lack of #1 really
hampers further progress on these types of systems. So, I agree with
Arne, you'll make a much more valuable contribution by going for
quality data on brighter stars. Plenty of people are merely trying to
detect variables. What we need is an efficient system for getting
high-quality follow-up data on large numbers of stars over long
periods. 

Dirk