Re: New Guy

[Stupendous Man <richmond@a188-l009.rit.edu>]

> First I ran the wsv3.pl script on the collected.big file. Then I opened it
> in Excel and sorted by the ws column. To keep it easy I deleted all the
> records with ws values less than 1. This left me with just over 9000
> records. The one at the top had a massive ws value of 879. I grep'd the data
> for this star out of the collected.big file and graphed it and it showed an
> obvious brightening. I entered the average coordinates into VizieR and it
> seems this star (number 89 from the collected.big file) is RW Mon.

  So far, so good.

> If it hadn't shown up in the GCVS I would go through the processed described
> on http://www.tass-survey.org/tass/suspect.html. This sound ok?

  Yup.
 
> I'm not sure where I can best add value here, but one thing I could easily
> do is write a script to interact with SIMBAD or VizieR  to look for probable
> matches for stars with ws > 1. This is my current intention.

  Excellent!  As you are discovering, it's tedious to sit at the
keyboard and type coordinates into the SIMBAD query box to check
against current catalogs.  If you can make a script which does
the querying automatically, that would save us all a lot of boring
work.

  I'd just _love_ something like a Perl script which takes the name
of a big .cal file as input, and spits out a list of confirmed
SIMBAD (or other) cross-IDs as output.  (drool, drool)  If one
can (optionally) narrow the selection down to stars which are variable,
so much the better!

> Question: do the GCVS and NSV catalogs have most "known" variable in them?

  Most?  Dunno.  Certainly a lot.  But there are some extra catalogs 
you can check.  One list is at

       http://stupendous.rit.edu/tass/catalogs/catalogs.html

Check out the links which appear about halfway down the list,
starting with the GCVS4 and going through the ASAS variables.
Most of the catalogs in between focus on areas near the celestial
equator.  As I recall, Tom's Mark IV has been concentrating on
Declinations between +5 and +10 degrees, so there may be some
overlap with these catalogs.

                                   Michael Richmond