The All Sky Automated Survey. Variable Stars in the 0h - 6h Quarter of the Southern Hemisphere

TL;DR

This paper presents the initial results from the ASAS project, analyzing over 1.3 million stars in the southern hemisphere to identify and classify variable stars using automated methods.

Contribution

It introduces a fully automated classification algorithm for variable stars and provides the first large-scale catalog from the ASAS survey.

Findings

Identified 3,126 variable stars from 1.3 million analyzed.

Classified variable stars into eclipsing, pulsating, Mira, and other types.

Made the photometric data publicly available online.

Abstract

This paper describes the first part of the photometric data from the 9x9 deg ASAS cameras monitoring the whole southern hemisphere in V-band. Data acquisition and reduction pipeline is described and preliminary list of variable stars is presented. Over 1,300,000 stars brighter than V=15 on 40,000 frames were analyzed and 3126 were found to be variable (1046 eclipsing, 778 regular pulsating, 132 Mira and 1170 other, mostly SR, IR and LPV stars). Periodic light curves have been classified using the fully automated algorithm, which is described in detail. Basic photometric properties are presented in the tables and thumbnail light curves are printed for reference. All photometric data is available over the INTERNET at http://www.astrouw.edu.pl/~gp/asas/asas.html or http://archive.princeton.edu/~asas .