Tuesday 7th October 2014. Variable stars GCVS V0851, V0854,V085

A fairly clear early 6 a.m. with Orion and the Pleiades prominent on high and Jupiter bright.  Venus will rise before the Sun and Mercury afterwards. everything is washed out however by the brilliant Moon blazing away in the West.

Yesterday I included an image of the open cluster NGC 2301. I had used the remote telescope T30 in Siding Spring in New South Wales. To identify variable stars in this cluster I used the "Catalogue of Variable Stars in Clusters" that can be accessed through VizieR part of the CDS collection of astronomical catalogues based at the observatory in Strasbourg. I visited Strasbourg on business some years ago and accidentally came across the observatory dome in the city's botanical gardens. The observatory changed country a few times I believe because of its location between France and Germany- currently in France. There are three GCVS variable stars in this cluster that I have identified as shown below.

 

 Here is a chart of the cluster

and one with a closer view.

 

I could not find comparison and check stars from AAVSO so I located V magnitudes using SkyX. I had taken another image using T11 in New Mexico which gave better signal to noise ratio so I used that to do the photometry.

The image loaded into VPhot shows the variable, comparison and check stars.

 Here are the untransformed results. I need B filter images to be able to do the transformation.