2018 data update (35/n)

[Orig: September 12, 2018]

Hello all!

Just wanted to share an update on how observations are going. The star has been a bit quite since March of this year, when we saw the two deepest dips since the Kepler mission (Caral-Supe and Evangeline). After March, the brightness has hovered slightly above normal (I define "normal" brightness as the brightness level just before Elsie in 2017 May. This is equal to unity on the graphs, and can be traced with the horizontal dotted line). During this time, I believe that there has been variability on small (<1%) levels, but nothing of significance.

Newest development: Last Friday night, data taken at OGG (Hawaii) showed a drop in brightness at the ~1% level. While this is not a large drop, we eagerly awaited data from more telescopes to confirm it, with hopes that it would continue to drop as well. Unfortunately we were not so lucky (this time!), as the brightness over the next 24 hours rose back up to nominal levels. It has remained constant at this level through the rest of the week.

More later,

~Tabby and team

Note from previous post that still applies: The gray vertical line indicates the time of the change in configuration. There are still some remaining issues that we need to address for data taken primarily during the first week of June (where you see a gap in data) and hopefully we will be able to update this soon with those measurements. Also, all data taken after this time have an unknown vertical offset. As such, these measurements are set to be consistent with the flux at the end of May until we can better assess what, if anything, had changed during the gap.

PS: These observations are happening because of the wonderful backers of our 2016 Kickstarter project. The Kickstarter campaign has ended, but we are still accepting donations to purchase additional observing time on the LCO 0.4m network. Thanks in advance for your support!