I've always wanted to practice astronomy toward scientific goals - pretty pictures are over done by my peers and achievable mostly with obscenely expensive equipment. I strive to build a stable and accurate telescope system to capture images from which meaningful data can be extracted - I'm not there yet, and a new single arm massive mount is completed to support a 14" Celestron optical tube assembly and the 8 inch newtonian; see here. The Starizona Hyperstar will allow imaging at F/2, an ultrafast system indeed.
Above is a light curve of the cataclismic variable IY Ursa Majoris. I had written my own code to determine the magnitudes but I couldn't compete with Maxim DL. After removing dark frames and flat fielding the 100 images with my s/w, the relative magnitude were extracted and plotted. The results are acceptable, but there is room for improvement; use a guide star to track, UBV filters, lower CCD temperature (had frosting problems). Images are from an Audine KAF0400E, binning 2x2, 120 seconds exposure at 0 degree centigrade. The raw and reference were shifted up to better see the result.
