We have a look at the V, R, and I-band photometry for the star T-Ori this week. We only show the data from the last observing season, i.e. the winter of 2024/25. The star is placed near a bright filament of reflected light in the Orion nebula, hence some of it’s brightness measurements can be erroneous. Furthermore, it is very bright so is saturate in some of the images.
We looked at parts of the data for this object before in weeks 101, and 248. From this we know that the star has a baseline magnitude about which it varies by minimal amounts on short timescales. These variations are of the order of up to a few ten percent. In addition the star shows much deeper dimming events at irregular intervals. These can last up to a few weeks and are usually up to a magnitude deep.
In the last observing season we can see that this general picture has not changed. There are some low level ups and downs, and we can identify two deeper dimming events. The last one reached about two magnitudes in depth. In many of the previous seasons there were many more such dimming events, so this was one of the more quieter seasons we have seen of the object since 2013 … lets see what the next season brings.