[Aavso-photometry] Re: AE Aqr

[Tomas L. Gomez]

Thank you very much for your emails. They were very useful. On the night of
Sep 2 I followed, most of the time, a VBBBVBBB... sequence.  I have already 
reduced my observations from Aug 31 and Sep 2, and I have just submitted
them. 
I used the transformation coefficients calculated with IRAF, using 6 stars in 
frames of the field Landolt 113. The mean error that I got was 0.03, both for 
B and V, so this is the error that I have reported. 

I was very impressed to see the star gain half magnitude (with the B
filter) in less
than an hour,  so I reduced the exposures to 8m with B and 4m with V, and 
then I saw a sharp decline of about 1 mag. I also observed the B-V color 
changing quite a lot in the process.

Maybe I should have given less exposure to get better time resolution. 
With the exposures I gave, I optimized the SNR, but a shorter exposure
should have still given a good SNR.  

I used ensemble photometry with the following stars from the AAVSO chart:

113:  V=11.26  B-V=0.75
116:  V=11.56  B-V=0.95

i.e., I reported the average of two measurements, each with one of these 
stars.
In the chart, only the V magnitude is given. I measured B-V
using as reference the four brightest stars in the aeaqr.dat file (they have
V magnitudes between 14 and 15). 

By the way, in the aeaqr.dat file there is a star with magnitude 11. 
I was planning to use this star, but then I saw that it is AE Aqr!

Michel, I liked very much your web-page. By the way, what were the maximum
counts that you typically got for AE Aqr, with those short exposures?

-Tomas