November 28, 2009: RZ Cassiopeiae

Dave Goggin

Had fun tonight watching the variable star RZ Cas from my house in downtown San Francisco. As usual, I used my 8x21 binocs. This star's normal brightness is about 6.2 but in eclipse, it drops to 7.7.

At 8:35pm before RZ really started its eclipse, it was a pretty similar brightness to stars HD16769 and HD17463 (a.k.a. SU Cas) with which it forms an obtuse triangle. All three were pretty easy to see. HD15784, nearby was somewhat more difficult at mag. ~6.6

By 9:41pm RZ was really faint, hard to see even with averted vision. Dimmer than '784 even.

By 10:26pm RZ had disappeared from my view entirely, despite a slight improvement in transparency.

mid-eclipse was apparently 11:08pm but I didn't go look then.

After the whole eclipse was over, at 1:40am, RZ was back to normal brightness as I saw it before, as if nothing had happened. :)

(Special thanks to calsky.com for providing the schedule. What a great web site!)

DG