Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 17:37:50 -0500
From: Steve Sharpe <sbsharpe

>Steve et al:
>
>from both a lot of visual observing experience, and now CCD imaging 
>of a several hundred fields, I'm finding the most sequences have 
>smaller issues than you'd think.  Indeed, I am impressed with the 
>capability of the chart photometry done in the 1st half of this 
>neither compression nor baseline issues affect observing values you 
>report.  There are a lot of charts that do not cover the bottom end, 
>but most of us don't have scope that can get that low anyway.  Good 
>(enough) charts outnumber bad charts >10:1 and there are only a 
>handful of "useless" charts.
>
>But a better reason why star are underobserved is that some people 
>among us can do 50 to 200 estimates a night, which means travelling 
>
>It really boils down to what you want to do and how many hours you 

Sure. Or how many hours of "free" time you have available to put into 
it...or how many hours of clear skies your locality has available to 
put into it...

Speaking for myself, I have been observing variables for something 
over 33 years, now, and I keep my own light curves of those 
observations. It is not easy to walk away from a star that you have 
been observing for that long in such a circumstance. That said, I am 
always tweaking my programme, dropping or "demoting" stars and adding 
new ones that interest me. I have been slowly moving away from Miras 
and getting more into following RV Tauri stars and SRs...and I'll bet 
that most stars on the underobserved list are Miras.

Another point: during the Mattei era I detected a definite shift in 
interest in the AAVSO away from Miras and more towards CVs. That 
could be a factor as well.
Steve
•

sbs
sbsharpe
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