eclipsing binary section

Webinar

• How to plan observing of eclipsing binaries when ephemerides are out of date - presented by Bob Buchheim, Gary Billings, Eric Dose, Sebastian Otero, Bert Pablo, and Gerry Samolyk. April 15, 2020.

Photometry of Eclipsing Binaries

New EBs identified by Sebastian Otero and his colleagues:

• The AAVSO facility VPHOT is available to members for processing CCD images and performing photometry.
• AIP4WIN, astronomical image processing software that accompanies the book The Handbook of Astronomical Image Processing, by Berry and Burnell.  Many observers find this software inexpensive, functional, and easy to use.

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:

"An observation in a drawer is no observation at all."  I've lost the reference to who said that, but it is worth repeating.  Your observations must be put in to the public record to be useful.

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

This page will assume you are an amateur astronomer with some experience taking and processing CCD images.  The procedures for doing this are described in the AAVSO CCD Observing Manual, except that it is not essential that you be able to perform transformations.  Also, see our Bibliography, and Software Resources pages.

Equipment

Neils Bohr is reputed to have said, "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future", but we can say a few things based on what is already on the market, and on the drawing boards.