Dear all, an astronomer colleague of mine asked if I could recruit a few enthusiastic amateurs to join a photometry campaign on YY Gem, any time during their low-frequency radio monitoring of the same source in September 2022. I have not used my astrophoto setup for this kind of work yet, but I have seen a number of you doing some kind of photometry along with your imaging. Any advice on how to organize such a campaign would be welcome!

YY Gem is an eclipsing variable star quite close to Castor (Alpha Geminorum). It is around 10mg, and its period is 0.8 days. This means we need good global coverage of telescopes to record the full light curve. The goal is to find evidence for spots on the star's surface (from low-amplitude modulation on top of the typical light curve), and cross-match that with the radio data to see if the spots are responsible for the low-frequency radio emission in some ways. The radio telescope to be used for this is LOFAR. Unfortunately, September is not ideal for us because Gemini is visible in the early hours.

Clear Skies!
Zsolt
(I hope this kind of post is allowed here, sorry if I broke a rule!)
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