Dip update 40/n

[Orig: July, 26 2017]

Hi everyone,

To update you on recent developments:

• Below is the latest light curve. As you can see, nothing drastic has happened, but the star still doesnt appear quite back to its "normal" state.

• We have been working on the quality of the pipeline. Here is another plot to show slight changes made to the light curve, in particular after day~50. This is because we now include a new adjustment to the data, or "detrending", to correct for unwanted systematic trends that were introduced when we adjusted the telescope pointing at that time. The blue "OGG-detrended" points here are the ones that have been corrected, and this is what is used in the light curve above.

• Our new LCO contract to increase our number of hours on the network this semester is signed. We now have ~200 hours remaining on the 40cm network for the 2017 AB semester, which ends November 30, 2017. This will allow us to continue our current observing sequence at a comfortable cadence. I am still chewing on the idea for another crowd funding effort, and I appreciate the words of support and advice have given me so far.

• In other news, our colleague Huan Meng (PI of the Spitzer monitoring program for this star) informed us earlier this week that the next observation is scheduled for August 16, UTC 12:20:02 (typical time uncertainty ~10 min or less). That's about 2 days after the star becomes observable by Spitzer. (We will coordinate observations with Swift to be taken at the same time, and of course LCO will also have its eyes on it!) After this, the next Spitzer observation will come between November 16 and December 15, and the one after will be at some point between March 1 and March 23 next year. If the star starts to act up again, we may submit a DD proposal at any time to increase this frequency.

All the best,

~Tabby and team