Photometry of WZ Sge at RIT Observatory: August 25, 2001 UT

On the night of August 25, 2001 UT, Michael Richmond and Jim Kern used the RIT Observatory's 10-inch Meade LX200 telescope to monitor WZ Sge. All exposures were taken without the focal reducer, through a V-band filter, onto an SBIG ST-8 CCD camera. Each exposure was 15 seconds long. Due to the design of the SBIG software, the time of each exposure is accurate only to +/- 1 second. The field of view was about 17 by 12 arcminutes; a typical example is shown below:

We subtracted dark current from the images and divided by a median twilight sky flatfield. We ran software to detect all stars more than 4 sigma above the sky, then measured the light from each star within a circular aperture of radius 6.6 arcseconds.

The night was good: no clouds, and the quarter moon set a little after midnight. However, the increased exposure time (15 instead of 10 seconds) and good seeing caused the primary comparison star, "A" = GSC 1612.1830 = HD 191083, to be at or near saturation in some images. We did not use "A" as a comparison in the reductions below, though we did track its measurements.

We gathered about 817 images of the field. We fed all raw instrumental magnitudes of 183 stars into a program which implemented Honeycutt's inhomogeneous ensemble photometry technique. The solution gave most weight to the bright star "B" (marked above). The standard deviation from the mean magnitudes in the solution are shown below, as a function of differential magnitude.

The solution placed the mean magnitude of stars "A" = GSC 1612.1830 = HD 191083 and "B" = HD 351517 as follows:

       star   mean      stdev
         A    0.0       0.014     (not used as comparison)
         B    0.969     0.013 

We used star "B" as a check star to detect errors due to clouds or poor images (which clearly were present in the entire night's run). We discarded any image in which star "B" differed from its mean magnitude by more than +/- 3 times its standard deviation.

The final result is 804 measurements of WZ Sge, over a period of 6.5 hours. Here is the light curve:

You can download an ASCII text file with the measurements:

• download WZ Sge data

The file has some comments at the top, followed by data lines with 4 numbers per line, like this:

        Jul_27.06510     2117.56510   2117.56977   0.046 

1. UT day
2. Julian Date - 2,450,000
3. Heliocentric Julian Date - 2,450,000
4. differential V-band magnitude of WZ Sge (relative to star "A" = HD 191083)

Last modified 8/25/2001 by MWR.