old time series datasets

Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Fri, 01/28/2022 - 16:07

There were three AAVSOnet telescopes at Astrokolhoz Observatory (Tom Krajci) from 2009 through 2012: W28, W30 and BSM.  W28 and W30 were donated by the widow of Paul Wright, and BSM was the original Bright Star Monitor.  BSM was moved to Bill Stein's observatory and started taking data again in 2013.  W30 was moved to Bill Goff's observatory and took data for another year before it had mount problems and was decommissioned.  W28 remains in cold storage with a cracked corrector plate.

In a similar manner to W28, I'll be parsing the W30 and BSM observations for time series that look like they may have not been uploaded to the AID.  Part of the pipeline processing script are software routines that extract all stars from all images, but the epoch photometry databases built from those all-star extractions tends to avoid time series, as the EPD only includes transformed observations.  That means single-filter time series are ignored, and the extraction logic doesn't do particularly well even on multi-filter time series, instead stacking the results.  So your hand-processing of the data is very useful to get the maximum scientific value out of these decommissioned telescopes.

When I have the W30 nights logged, I'll post a forum message listing those targets that look promising.  If you decide to adopt one, please check the AID using LCG to be sure someone else hasn't uploaded the magnitude estimates in the past.  My guess is that any eclipsing binary targets for Kozyreva or Virnina were most likely NOT submitted to the AID.  Thanks!

Arne