OV Boo - another good night

[Dave Smith]

And yet another good night on OV Boo.

I collected 420 data points. Fortunately the software (Muniwin) does the darks, flats and astrometry automatically but it still took nearly 7 hours to process.

 

Looks cloudy the next few nights - time to get some sleep.

 

Dave

[DHEB]

This is very interesting, congratulations. I wonder how visual estimates compare to your measurements. Trying to answer the question myself, I just had a look at AAVSO for this star, the last 20 days, and the data reported there pretty much resemble your charts, with lots of observations per day. These are marked as V (for visual) prevalidated, but it almost gives the impression of being the kind of automatic photometry you do. Have you tried to do any visual estimate?

[JeremyS]

44 minutes ago, Cinco Sauces said:

I wonder how visual estimates compare

When you have displayed the AAVSO light curve of the star, if you look at the top of the plot, you will see a whole series of ticks in boxes. Remove all the ticks (by clicking on each in turn) EXCEPT the first box which is "Vis" for Visual.

You will then see the visual magnitude observations displayed as black circles. There are not so many of them since most of the observations are CCD time series measurements rather like Dave's.

Jeremy

[DHEB]

27 minutes ago, JeremyS said:

When you have displayed the AAVSO light curve of the star, if you look at the top of the plot, you will see a whole series of ticks in boxes. Remove all the ticks (by clicking on each in turn) EXCEPT the first box which is "Vis" for Visual.

You will then see the visual magnitude observations displayed as black circles. There are not so many of them since most of the observations are CCD time series measurements rather like Dave's.

Jeremy

Thanks. Of course that's the way of doing it. There are only a few visual estimates, as you say, some of them are way off the ccd ones.

[SilverAstro]

4 hours ago, JeremyS said:

When you have displayed the AAVSO light curve of the star, if you look at the top of the plot, you will see a whole series of ticks in boxes. Remove all the ticks (by clicking on each in turn) EXCEPT the first box which is "Vis" for Visual.

That sounds handy but I see no boxes ! I have to go back to the set-up page and re-plot with unticked boxes there, what am I doing wrong I wonder ? perhaps not the right browser/java ?? ( tried in IE and K-Meleon, a Firefox clone)

Screen grab :-

[DHEB]

That's the kind of plot that LCG produces. That's the old version, the one I like. There is a new one, LCG2, which I do not find so nice.

[SilverAstro]

3 hours ago, Cinco Sauces said:

There is a new one, LCG2,

Ah! Thank you,   didnt know about that one, been using LCG for years now - got into bad habit of just going to the tools I am in the habit of using !!

[Dave Smith]

18 hours ago, Cinco Sauces said:

This is very interesting, congratulations. I wonder how visual estimates compare to your measurements. Trying to answer the question myself, I just had a look at AAVSO for this star, the last 20 days, and the data reported there pretty much resemble your charts, with lots of observations per day. These are marked as V (for visual) prevalidated, but it almost gives the impression of being the kind of automatic photometry you do. Have you tried to do any visual estimate?

Thanks Cinco, my observations are also on the AAVSO data base so some are bound to be the same.

When you ask, have I tried visual estimates then the answer is NO. Up until this year I have mainly been an imager and haven't looked through an eyepiece for years. I am also really only just starting in with variable stars and looked at OV Boo almost by accident. Tuesday evening last week I received the alert email and believing it to be cloudy had a quick look outside to find it was clear and so I started. Had it been cloudy I would likely have forgotten about that email.  I am still on a steep learning curve and am quite keen to try some other types of binary but feel I should stick with this until it gets too faint for my setup. Last night was cloudy but the next three nights look promising.

Dave

[Dave Smith]

I must ask - what is LCG or LCG2?

Dave

[SilverAstro]

2 hours ago, Dave Smith said:

I must ask - what is LCG or LCG2?

AAVSO Light Curve Generator  https://www.aavso.org/lcg

and the new version is at https://www.aavso.org/LCGv2

 

[Dave Smith]

Thank you very much, they look rather useful

Dave