Future Astronomers

March 13 - James and I went to West Park Place school to do a star
party for the 4th grade classes.  James borrowed 4 portable Celestron
telescopes from the University.  The night was pretty clear and
quite warm. Jupiter, Venus and Mars were all easy to find.  There
were about 30 kids (plus quite a few parents:) there.  They all
had a great time looking through the telescopes.  Everyone loved
Jupiter with its moons, and you could see the polar cap on Mars.

DARC News, future plans, WET workshop in 2013

Hello everyone,

It has been a while since I've sent around an update.  Here's a
summary of what has been going on....

XCOV28 - this run holds the record for the number of targets covered!
We got good coverage for all of our targets.  For the DAs: the HS0507
FT is excellent (see attached).
The data set spans over 37 days.  HL Tau 76 also received good
coverage, especially at the end of the run. Its total light curve is
also over a month long.  We switched to G191-16 towards the end of the
run.  This star is a multiperiodic pulsator.  All three stars are
excellent candidates for light curve fitting. G132-16 is one of the
hotter pulsators we've looked at (12600 K).  We are hoping to use this
star, with G117-B15A, to pin down  convection on the hot end of the
instability strip.  Finally, my personal favorite for this run was
BPM31594.  This star is dominated by a main mode with a series of
harmonics, plus power near, but not precisely at,  the subharmonics.
It is also an excellent candidate for light curve fitting.
For the DBs: we obtained excellent coverage of EC04207.  This star is
dominated by a single mode with harmonics.  EC05221 turned out to be
an unstable pulsator, alot like R808.  The more data we added to its
light curve, the lower the FT amplitudes became.  We should definitely
re-observe this star at some point to see if it characteristics
change.

This run promises to add multiple new points to our map of convection
across both the DA and DB instability strips.

I have nearly finished with the referee report on the EC14012-1446
paper.  The report was very positive, with helpful suggestions.  I'm
planning on uploading he revised version
in a few days.  If anyone has any acknowledgements to add, please send
them to me.

Future plans:  we are planning a mini-campaign (DAMP05) for this
spring.  So far we have confirmed dates at Tubitak (April 19-28, May
10-12) and CTIO (May 7-16).  Our suggested
targets include GD165 and HS1531+7436.  If anyone is interested in
participating, let me know!!

There are preliminary plans to hold the 8th WET Workshop in February
2013 in Beijing, hosted by the Beijing Normal University.  It is very
early in the planning process, so please let
us know if you have any suggestions!!

Cheers,
Judi