Re: GSC 540-84

[Michael Koppelman <lolife@bitstream.net>]

Thanks, Arne.

I don't believe, myself, that my errors are understated by a factor of 
10, but anything is possible. I'm only worried (currently) about 
internal errors, since I'm not on a standard system. Maybe someone more 
learned would want to try re-reduce that night of data and see if they 
get different results? I'm not convinced that those points are 
something necessarily astrophysically interesting, but I am convinced 
they are in the data and not errors introduced by the investigator.

The displacement I was talking about (and it wasn't clear to me if you 
were talking about the same displacement) was how the minimum was 
smooth on some cycles and rough on others. I'm pretty sure, and others 
have seemed to agree, that this represents an additional fourier 
component and not errors on my part.

Since this is such a short period system, I want to grab a lot of 
cycles and see if I can shed some light on this.

I know that scientists are loath to assume and that amateurs (or more 
accurately myself) are probably too willing to look for interesting 
features where they are not. I see the wisdom of this and I am heading 
that way. At the same time, I think great advances in science are made 
when wild speculation leads people to study things that more prudent 
people would dismiss. My point here is only that I intend to continue 
to wildly speculate because it is creativity that ultimately leads to 
good science. Lest this seem ungrateful, I am very grateful that Arne 
and others keep my feet on the ground. There is a big difference 
between wild speculation when it doesn't matter (like on an email list) 
as opposed to when it does matter (as in publication).

Cheers,
Michael



On Wednesday, September 3, 2003, at 01:38 PM, Arne Henden wrote:

> These 2 points may be outside 3-sigma, but are not duplicated on other 
> nights.
> It is highly unlikely that the pulsational period would be locked
> to an orbital period if this is an eclipsing system.  More likely is
> that you have just underestimated your errors.  The displacement of
> the Rc vs V light curves every so often is also troubling and
> sounds like an instrumental/reduction error to me, or again an
> underestimate of the errors.