Finding comp stars

[James Roe]

I'm working on data mining a set of my images looking for new variable
stars. I have no known steady comp stars to use as reference for this
field, yet there must be a few (at least) that are relatively stable
to check for variability among the others. I'm using Photometrica to
do large scale photometric reductions but haven't developed a plan yet
to look at a bunch of light curves that are arbitrarily referenced to
pick out which stars might be steady. Does anyone have a strategy?

Jim Roe [ROE]

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[Stupendous_Man]

I suggest using some sort of ensemble photometry on all the stars in a
field to identify the stars which vary in a significant manner from
those which do not. You could also -- after having done the ensemble
photometry --- use the results to compute a Welch-Stetson-like
statistic for the stars, and use THAT as an additional indicator of
variability.

References:

Ensemble photometry: Honeycutt, PASP 104, 435 (1992)

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=1992PASP..104..435H&db_key=AST&high=416a79eb0026781

http://spiff.rit.edu/ensemble/

Welch-Stetson technique: Welch and Stetson, AJ 105, 1813 (1993)

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1993AJ....105.1813W