Re: First Variable Star?

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

Fraser,

Thank you for your comments.  I am going to have to learn about star types 
and the like.  No end of things to learn on this project.  At the moment, 
becoming competent in Perl is at the top of the list.

I have 50 or so points on this star, and I am pretty sure it a period in 
the 10 - 100 hour range.   Looks like I have a few of these in the data set 
I am working on.  Your description below matches well what I see.

My emphasis over the next few weeks will be to work on sorting the good 
stuff from the junk.  There are lots of cuts to try to make the data better.

We shall see.

Tom Droege

At 06:47 PM 3/22/02 +1030, you wrote:
>Your candidate corresponds well to HD 64885 which is not known to be
>variable. However a lot of the B-type stars are known to be short-period
>low amplitude variables (typically of the "Beta Cepheii" class). And the
>vague boundary between "variable star" and "constant star" tends to cause
>religious wars from time to time. A 0.06 mag variation is getting close to
>no-man's-land I think....
>
>But assuming it's not a camera fault or data reduction error, or a bogus
>caused by thin cloud and/or changing airmass, then you may indeed be onto
>a Discovery ;-)