Affiliation
British Astronomical Association, Variable Star Section (BAA-VSS)
Mon, 03/04/2024 - 20:04
I thought this forum would be my first port of call, but sorry to be blunt, the forum looks inactive and I clicked on two
links in posts and both were dead.
I was hoping to get some EB minima if that's useful but wondered where to start.
Maybe there's a better place.
I assumed that Target Tool would have upcoming worthwhile projects.
Thanks
Kevin
Kevin: it is true, there is not a lot of traffic here, but the forum is "alive".
Re what to observe: you didn't mention that you had looked there, so I'll mention it. There are pages devoted to each Observing Section. The ones for the "Eclipsing Binary Section" do contain some information about what EBs you might observe.
I understand there will be an EB Section online meeting sometime soon, I'm hoping target selection will be discussed. I would be particularly interested in hearing from professional astronomers re what EBs are interesting to them (and for which the types of observations we can make, will add to their work).
I personally don't use the Target Tool: last time I tried it, it identified EBs all right, wasn't based on expected eclipses, which is the most common activity of EB observing. I.e. it would list EBs that were observable, but not those necessarily having an eclipse. And there was no indication of scientific interest. There are gazillions of EBs...
Myself, I do eclipse timing of little-observed "Otero+" stars (see the EB Section pages), or new discoveries by ASASSN, particularly eccentric systems.
HTH, Gary Billings
Kevin:
Welcome to the EB Section forum. If you post a question here you will generally get a response within 24 hours, As the EB Section Co-Leader I monitor this forum on a dailly basis. Are you looking for EB minima for a specific target? Gerard Samolyk, the other Co-Leader, regularly publishes times-of-minima for hundreds of variable stars in most issues of JAAVSO. If you go to the astrophysics data system and perform a search based on "object" it will find most published work on a particular star.
As mentioned by Gary Billings, Gerard and I are in the midst of scheduling an open Zoom meeting sometime within the next few weeks to discuss photometric acquisition, data reduction and modeling of light curve data from eclipsing binaries. Hopefully, these will lead to a series of other regularly scheduled EB Section Zoom meetings in the future.
Regards,
Kevin B. Alton