[Aavso-photometry] Landolt error bars

[Michael Koppelman]

You can certainly do chi-squared, least squares, etc. with magnitudes.  
Most papers on stellar photometry can just treat magnitudes as regular  
numbers. The only exception I can think of is if you want to subtract  
out the influence of one star from two stars that you can't resolve  
(e.g. Lew Cook's "Nemesis" spreadsheet) then you need to convert to  
fluxes, subtract and then convert back.

You probably know more about this than me, as I am merely a student of  
the subject, but I wrote a paper which discusses, tangentially,  
perhaps, some of these issues:

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005SASS...24..107K

M.


On Jul 21, 2008, at 1:13 PM, Ben Davies wrote:

> And it sure seems like adding, squaring, etc logarithms as if they  
> were regular numbers would not be the thing to do.  I am probably  
> all wet here but, straighten me out.