IBVS (7 December 2009)

COMMISSIONS 27 AND 42 OF THE IAU
INFORMATION BULLETIN ON VARIABLE STARS
Announcement

Konkoly Observatory
Budapest
7 December 2009
HU ISSN 0374 - 0676 (print)
HU ISSN 1587 - 2440 (on-line)

EDITORIAL NOTE

On publishing minima/maxima times

There is a long tradition of publishing minima/maxima times of variables in IBVS. We find errata published for a considerable number of papers falling to this category. As it is a tedious work for the Editors or the referee to check each published minimum, we have decided to require additional information from the authors.

Henceforth we ask authors to find a suitable ephemeris for each given star, compute the O-C values by this ephemeris for their observations, and if possible, compare them with values listed in databases, such as the "UP-TO-DATE LINEAR ELEMENTS OF ECLIPSING BINARIES" by J.M. Kreiner (http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/ephem/), the "Eclipsing Binary O-C Files" by Bob Nelson (http://www.aavso.org/observing/programs/eclipser/omc/), or the "Lichtenknecker-Database of the BAV" (http://www.bav-astro.de/LkDB/index.php?lang=en).

We ask authors to submit a simple ASCII version of their LaTeX table, with two additional columns, containing the O-C value, and an ephemeris reference. An additional table could be used to expand these references.

Example:

Star name Time of min. Error Type Filter Rem. O-C [Day] Eph. ref. CN Con 52901.8225 3 I V 0.0590 1,2,3 52935.6071 3 I V 0.0600 1,2,3 CW Con 52971.5268 3 I - -0.0076 1 BF Con 52657.691 2 I V 0.014 1,2 FP Con 52957.7890 6 I - -0.0663 4 Ephemeris references: 1: Kreiner, UP-TO-DATE LINEAR ELEMENTS OF ECLIPSING BINARIES 2: Nelson, Eclipsing Binary O-C Files 3: Lichtenknecker-Database of the BAV 4: FP Con, E=2425984.3629 P=0.947236d, Kholopov et al., 1985

These additional tables will not be published, they serve solely for the purpose of quality control.

The Editors