FreeLists / az-observing / [AZ-Observing] WZ Sge outburst

[Brian Skiff <bas@xxxxxxxxxx>]

     The biggest thing happening in astronomy in the last two weeks has
not been silly press releases from professionals, but instead the 
amateur-led observations of the rare outburst of the dwarf nova WZ Sagittae.
It's turning out that the lightcurve is evolving on hourly timescales.
Luckily photometry by amateurs has been continuous for about 70% of the
time since the outburst thanks to coordination by the 'vsnet' group.
Gianluca Masi in Italy has been most enthusiastic and is posting his
nightly results here:

http://www.eurolink.it/comets/wzsge.htm

Skip through the nightly panels of data plots in quick succession to see
how the pattern is changing.  These patterns have not been previously
observed.  The more extensive page at the 'vsnet' site:

http://www.kusastro.kyoto-u.ac.jp/vsnet/DNe/wzsge01.html

...has the running chronology of the event (which is threatening to
exhaust all parties).  The color panel near the top shows the extent of
the worldwide coverage of the star.  The variations are pretty much
completely out of range for visual obsevers, so this is really the domain
of the prepared CCD folks.

\Brian
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