I was interested in seeing if I could find variable stars in Praesepe (the Beehive Cluster), so I imaged the cluster on 4-11-2023.  To my rather great surprise, ASTAP found a bunch, as seen in Rev. B -- all the yellow annotations are variables and the green annotations are check stars of constant magnitude.  I felt like I was a kid who found the Easter eggs hidden in a closet before the parents could spread them out them in the yard!  But hold on -- I found that all but two of the variables, one called MP Cnc and the other called RY Cnc, were saturated in the image, which meant that any variations in light output would be clipped and therefore not detectable in full.  And this was in 30-s images!  Apparently my set-up saturates the pixels for stars brighter than about 9th magnitude!  RY Cnc was too dim to be reliably measured, so my only choice was to investigate MP Cnc, which is an eclipsing variable system of type EW; MP is circled at the upper left in the posted image.  EW systems consist of two stars orbiting so closely to one another that their outer atmospheres are actually in contact!  The close proximity of the two stars requires rapid revolution about their mutual center of mass, so these systems have quite short orbital periods.  Indeed, the orbital period of MP Cnc is 8.4 hr, which is quite similar to the period of 7.9 hr for the prototype star of this class of eclipsing binary systems, W Ursae Majoris.  The amplitudes of the light variations are also similar:  a max of 0.50 mag for MP Cnc and 0.73 mag for W Ursae Majoris.  MP Cnc is spectral class G0V, which is similar to the spectral class our sun, G2V.  We all know that stars are pretty darned  big compared to our earth.  For MP Cnc, try to imagine two gigantic balls of hot gas, each about the size of our sun, whirling around one another completely in about 8 hours!  A planet in such a system orbiting the two stars at about the distance of earth's orbital radius would be a wild ride for any potential inhabitants.  The tidal forces caused by the stars going from being aligned with the orbital radius vector to being aligned at a right angle to the orbital radius vector about every 2 hours would be pretty formidable!

My results, which are graphically portrayed in Revs. C and D, are consistent with published data for the period and magnitude range of MP Cnc, which is a good thing LOL.  Note that the constancy of the magnitude of the check star (000-BKB-278) is important because it demonstrates that the light variations in the variable star are from the behavior of the star and not some kind of environmental effects. 

The image data consisted of 90 30-s images collected over 1.8 hours on 4-11-2023 my time; the images were integrated light (RGB).