[Aavso-photometry] AAVSO Campaigns update

[matthewt at aavso.org]

Hello everyone,

I have a brief campaigns update.  First, Dr. Julian Osborne extends his
thanks to all observers who have contributed observations of Nova LMC 2009;
these data are greatly appreciated.  He sent along the following late last
week:

 	Thanks very much for your efforts and the efforts of
 	your observers in trying to nail the period of nova
 	LMC 2009. The data collected so far are very impressive.

 	As I said, we believe the period of this object is
 	1.19 days, but shorter periods (1.51 and 1.70 hours)
 	are possible. The AAVSO datasets are nice being so much
 	longer than Swift can obtain. However they do not yet come
 	down very strongly in favour of any of the candidate periods.
 	If it is at all possible, I would like to encourage your
 	observers to stick with this object, collecting long
 	timeseries like they have done so far.

 	This is a difficult object to observe, and the period is
 	not easy to tie down. Nevertheless, the AAVSO is probably
 	the most capable organisation to achieve this. I hope you
 	will be able to keep up the good work.

For those of you in the southern hemisphere capable of reaching
17th magnitude or fainter, observations are encouraged!


Second, I'd like to mention some of the other campaigns we're running
for a number of people.  We're received a lot of data for several of the
recent campaigns, including FIRST J1023, V1412 Aql, BG Gem -- thanks to
all of the observers who participate in these, nice work!  We'll work
with the PIs of each project to make sure they achieve their science
goals and put your data to good use.  We also continue to receive
observations for several long-term programs, such as Blazar monitoring,
U Sco, and the EM Cyg/YZ Cnc/Z Cam monitoring.  Thanks again to
participants in these, your observations are greatly appreciated!

One of these campaigns in particular -- the EM Cyg/YZ Cnc/Z Cam
monitoring program is certainly worth looking into, especially if you
have observed these stars in the past.  A campaign by Dr. Elmar Koerding
and collaborators run on SS Cyg a few years ago resulted in the exciting
discovery that dwarf novae exhibit transient radio jets, providing a
"missing link" with other accreting binary systems that exhibit the
same.  There have been a few cases during the past year where we saw a
promising outburst, but there was too much time between observations to
ascertain when the outburst began.  As a result, we've yet to trigger
radio observations for any of these sources.  If you observe these
systems now, or have done so in the past, please consider increasing the
frequency with which you observe them.  Most importantly, visual
observations of all systems are equally important as CCD data -- in
fact, you may be able to report an outburst faster than instrumental
observers.  Please participate if you can!

For more information on AAVSO Observing Campaigns, please visit our
website: http://www.aavso.org/news/campaigns.shtml

Thanks as always to all AAVSO observers for your work -- we couldn't do
the science that we do without you!

Clear skies,

Matthew Templeton
AAVSO Campaign Coordinator