AAS 195th Meeting, January 2000
Session 36. White Dwarfs New and Old
Display, Thursday, January 13, 2000, 9:20am-6:30pm, Grand Hall

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[36.10] Al Comae, Not So Red Afterall; Photometry and Spectroscopy of a Very Faint TOAD.

F.J. Galvan (Colby College), M. Garcia (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA), P.J. Callanan (University College, Cork)

A red inter-loper has been detected in the vicinity of the faint Tremendous Outburst Amplitude Dwarf (TOAD) AL Comae, with a 3.95 arc-seconds separation between the center of both systems. New infrared photometry was taken with the 2.1m IRIM camera on the observation nights of July 11 and 12 of 1997. Analysis of this data shows that the previously published K band magnitude for AL Comae is not 15.8 but rather 17.9, with a V-K magnitude similar to that of G type star. We conclude that previous photometric analysis of AL Comae was contaminated by the close red dwarf. This suggests that the results from the optical spectral analysis by Howell et al. might have been contaminated as well. A new spectorscopic analysis in the optical range has been done on data taken with the 4m MMT on February 7, 1997. These new analysis agrees with our new photometric results. We re-analyzed the WHT data published in Howell et al. taking the red neighbor into acount, but the re-analysis seemed to be consistent with that of the published paper.


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