Beautiful skies tonight and checked my usual recurrent nova targets without a result, as usual.
But in blinking the field later, I noticed a star that is normally bright (checked right back to March) was quite dim. Found the star in Starry Night (it said it wasn't variable, which turned out to be true) and I put the co-ords into AAVSO's Variable Star Plotter and told it to mark all variables in the field. It came up as WX SGR.
Googled that, and found that WX SGR is an eclipsing binary (mag 9.6-11.3). Presumably it is eclipsing now. Here's an animation:
Couldn't find any obs in AAVSO's database, so sent an alert just in case anyone was interested. Can't imagine that the period wouldn't be very well known - probably just that Algol and mates are much sexier!
In the wider field, also found Ceres (as always!
) plus asteroid 15 Eunomia, quite bright at mag 9.3 and another one that took a bit of hunting down (and gave the old heart a flutter - nova!!
)
It was below frame on 2 June.
