eclipsing binary section

Bibliography

If purchasing books, please consider purchasing from Amazon.com, accessed via the menu bar of the AAVSO website -- this provides financial support to the AAVSO.  Some books are only available secondhand, e.g. at abebooks.com

The following are useful books regarding eclipsing binary stars:

Determining the Time of Minimum

This is one step that is unique to observing eclipsing binaries.  Once you're taken images of the star field through an eclipse, and produced a time series of V-C magnitudes (and C-K to ensure quality), you must now determine the mid-time of the eclipse.  If your data is of good quality, and the star is not badly spotted, the time series will be symmetric around the midpoint of the eclipse.  Most algorithms for determining the ToM assume this is so.  They numerically "fold" the time series around a hypothesized midpoint, and compute how well the ingress and egress legs match.  The algorithm

Terminology

EB:  In this website, and in informal conversation, "EB" is short for "eclipsing binary" -- of any kind!  Not to be confused with "EB" in the GCVS or VSX, which means an eclipsing binary with a beta Lyrae light-curve morphology, as opposed to eclipsing binaries with EA or EW light curve morphologies.  Both of the general variable star books listed in the bibliography (i.e. Percy, or Hoffmeister et al.) explain the differences between the different types of EBs.