Early observations of the superoutburst

I have just added to the light curve the observations made by Marcin Wardak (Poland). These data contain only 9 points (laptop crash did not allowed to make more) but are made on Jan. 25 at 18:30 UT and are now our earliest observations of the current superoutburst.

More superhumps

I have just received the nice light curves of RZ LMi from Bob Koff and Jerry Foote. Its show clear superhumps with amplitude of 0.1 mag. The superoutburst continues. Keep observing and look below at beautiful effects of these observations :)

Superoutburst confirmed

I have reveived preliminary report from Kosmas Gazeas (Athens, Greece). Kosmas wrote:

The weather remained stable all night long and I managed to get a continuous series of about 300 images between 18:20 UT until 04:20 UT this morning. We will soon have a complete 10-hour lightcurve in our hands! The target was bright enough to be captured with a 0.4 m telescope. No obvious trent of light variation was noticed, but some small humps were visible. RZ LMi is still in the outburst mode!

RZ LMi in superourburst!

Jacek Pala (Slupsk, Poland) reports RZ LMi at magnitude 13.6 this morning (Jan 26, 3 GMT). It is our superoutburst, most probably!

Things you can do when is cloudy

Lack of good weather encouraged me to do some preliminary analysis. Our last outburst appeared to be quite long and bright. I compared it withvmean profile of outburst derived from 2004-2005 observations. See the picture below. The red and green points show January 2009 and mean 2004-2005 profiles of the outburst, respectively.



It is clear that our newest explosion was about 0.5 mag brighter and lasted about 1 day longer than a typical outburst from previous seasons.

Another pecularity is current supercycle length. We are waiting for the superoutburts for at least 23 days. This value is significantly higher than 19-day supercyle of RZ LMi.

Sad news

All our locations report bad weather conditions so I have no news to share with you. Fortunately, RZ LMi went to the quiescence and should stay there for a day or two.

Not a precursor

The newest data sent by Bob Koff show that RZ LMi faded to 15.5 mag and is about 1 mag fainter than during previous night. Ongoing explosion thus looks like an ordinary outburst and not a precursor seen at the beginning of the superoutburst.