First Variable Star?

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

OK, it is my birthday, and Santa brought me my first variable 
star.  Errr?  Who does bring you things on your birthday?  Not quite Easter 
Bunny time.  Hmmmm!  Possibly St. Joseph.  It is his day.  My real birthday 
present was a wind up flashlight.  That is the kind of thing that turns me 
on.  (pun intended)

In any case, I have enough code written that I can take the output of 
Michael's pipeline and look at it.  I generated a big list of stars with > 
10 sigma.  Many have just a few low brightness points.  One has a bright 
point.   Since all the spikes occur at roughly the same time, I assume 
these are little clouds going over.  There is a general dimming of the 
stars over the two hour run.  I assume that one does a correction for that 
by some time correction using the mean value of some fixed stars (The new 
photom?).  OK, just plotting suspected variables against fixed stars I 
found a few where there was a general trend away from the comparison 
star.  One is at:

RA 7h 56m 15.5s  +5d 49m 28.5s     mean V = 8.415   I = 8.485  Variation 
was about 0.06 mag over the 2.3 hour run.

sigma from the pipeline measurement was 0.003 for v, 0.002 for the 
i.  Looking at the plot, this star was increasing in brightness while all 
the other stars in it's vicinity were dimming.  Looks like 5-6 sigma from 
the plot (eyeball sigma).  I am making no claims.  Just that it is my 
birthday, and I think there is a good chance that this is a short period 
variable.

Simbad shows a star at:

RA 7h 56m 16.26s +5d 49m 28.4s    B = 8.41   V =  8.43  Type B9

How do I tell if it is a variable from the Simbad data?

I have two others, but they do not match Simbad very well.

OK, there is much work to be done.  Now I can try some of the things that I 
have been thinking about.  The first thing to do is to get the new version 
of "photom" installed.  It is clearly needed.

Tom Droege