[Aavso-photometry] Var Her 04 Update & News

[Aaron Price]

 The floodgates of data are open! I am just barely treading water here.
Make it your goal to drown me. :)

 So far the AAVSO has received a whopping 7,133 CCD time series
observations. A fourier analysis of the observations using Foster's
CLEANEST algorithm to help reduce the effects of gaps in the data reveals
a period of 0.05784 +/- 0.00001 days, in line with Tonny, Mike's and our
earlier calculations.  The semiamplitude is calculated at 0.0437+/-0.0013
mags but the fact that superhumps do not exhibit perfectly sinusoidal
variation and the dips/eclipses make fourier analysis unreliable for
amplitude calculation in this data set. Visual estimate puts it at around
0.2 mag according to the phase diagram but it seems to vary around that
according to the raw light curves.

 If this is a WZ Sge then this week will be an active one. A dramatic dip
should occur sometime this week along with a recovery. If you detect such
a dip in your data please post a message to this discussion group ASAP so
we can get many people on it. If any of you are ready for multicolor data,
that would be the time for a BVR campaign. I will update the AAVSO chart
tomorrow with R mags and post a message when it is ready.

 All of the light curves are updated at the URL below. In addition, I
added new plots of all the data minus a linear fit and also lots of new
zoomed in plots so you can see your own data. In the detrended plots the
averaged light curve sure shows the dips/eclipses well. Also, I put a
phase diagram of all our data phased to 0.058d and with a 0.1d average. It
shows the weird shape of the humping nicely, as Tonny mentioned earlier.
(FYI, I tend to update the observer plots a few times per day.)
            http://www.aavso.org/news/her04.shtml

 Abbout the possible new field variable: Two data sets have been submitted
so far by BKL and BDG. They suggest a period around 0.043 days with an
amplitude of around 0.1, which could be noise. Bruce Gary has noticed the
star is very red with a B-V of -1.43 so air mass effects could be at play
here. More study is underway and observations are needed.


Aaron