Happy New Year everyone!
We start 2021 with a look at the light curve of AA Ori. This is a know variable star in the southern outskirts of the Orion Nebula, M42. Gaia data places it at a distance of 414pc, so it is clearly associated with the main cluster of young stars in the nebula. We have a tremendous amount of data for this source, hence we just zoom in to the observing season 2014/15. This shows the typical behaviour of the star. There are periods of relative calm, intersected by short, about 0.5mag dips, but also longer term dimming events that can be up to 2mag deep. The star is clearly surrounded by a disk of material. This is also the most likely cause of the dimming events in the light curve. You can investigate the full light curve for this star by following this link.
As it is the start of a new year, I also wanted to send a big thank you to all the participants in the project. We have now accumulate just above 36260 images with a total of more than 155 million brightness measurements. The second image shows the cumulative rate at which the images have been taken. The green tick marks indicate dates of publications with HOYS data (all listed here) and the blue ticks indicate dates with talks given about the project. Let us know if you’d like a talk for your society and we will arrange one. Please keep the data coming in. We are in the process of preparing several further publications with analysis of the data. More news on those will come over the coming year.
Thank you very much!