THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS - OV Boo

[Dave Smith]

At the beginning of the week the weather forecast looked rather hopeless. On Tuesday night I received an alert that a particular star, OV Boo, was doing a super outburst with a request to monitor it closely. Just out of curiosity I looked out of the door and it was clear so set up quickly, found the star and was able to confirm that it was indeed much brighter than normal. It was around mag 11.5 instead of the quoted 18 - 20.6 so around 7 magnitudes brighter than normal. I monitored it until just after 1am the next morning when the cloud arrived. In fact cloud did interfere most of the evening.

Next evening (astro club night) it was wonderfully clear and so I took some 200 readings closely spaced to see the rather complicated detail in the light curve but in retrospect regretfully left that star and moved on to a more established binary HL Au (See separate post).

Thurs was cloudy and I was away most of the evening but it had magically cleared so out I went again and obtained more readings until the cloud firmly returned.

I have put the three separate nights on their own plots but have also included the graph for all three together to reveal the general trend. It has, of course, been cloudy ever since. The next chance seems to be Monday night which if the trend continues, OV Boo will be around mag 14, it will be interesting to see.

All this data has been added to the BAAVSS database.

Dave

[JeremyS]

Nice results Dave. This is a very rare superoutburst of what is likely a WZ Sagittae star, so definitely warrants follow-up photometry.

I have been monitoring it for an outburst for perhaps 10 years, so it's great finally to see one (even though I didn't discover it!).

Jeremy

[laudropb]

Very nice piece of work. I got a alert about this, but unfortunately it has rained ever since.