AAS 200th meeting, Albuquerque, NM, June 2002
Session 7. Variable Stars and Relatives
Display, Monday, June 3, 2002, 9:20am-6:30pm, SW Exhibit Hall

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[7.02] Observations of the Cepheid T Vul

K. Lapa (Central Arizona College, Superstition Mountain Campus), S. L. Baldwin (Central Arizona College, Supersition Mountain Campus), M. R. Grill (Central Arizona College, Superstition Mountain Campus)

Twenty nights of UBV photoelectric photometry are presented for the bright, northern Cepheid, T Vul. These observations were obtained in the fall of 2001 using the Phoenix-10 automatic photoelectric telescope at the Fairborn Observatory in southern Arizona. We calculated the phase using the epoch and period suggested by L. Szaboados of 2441705.127 + 4.435452 (Comm. Konkoly Obs., No. 96).. There were no errant points, and we obtained even phase coverage, although there were insufficient observations near the maxima to reliably calculate a new value. This project was the primary part of a class on observational astronomy at the Superstition Mountain campus of Central Arizona College. One of us, Lapa, has had a somewhat unusual pre-college education consisting of six years of home schooling. Lapa entered Central Arizona College, a two-year community college, at age fourteen. Now fifteen, he has completed three semesters at Central Arizona College and currently carries a 4.0 average. Lapa plans on completing his Associates of Science Degree at the community college level and continuing on at a university. All three authors wish to thank their instructor, Russell Genet, for making this exciting class possible. We also wish to thank Kenneth Kissell for his help in selecting T Vul, Douglas Hall for his suggestions with respect to a comparison and check star, Michael Seeds for managing the robotic telescope, and Louis Boyd for operating the telescope. We also wish to thank these gentlemen for the time they took to talk to our entire class on speaker-phone conference calls. Hands-on research has been a great community-college introduction to science for all of us.


The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: klaynkolt@hotmail.com

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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.