DQ Her is an eclipsing binary with an orbital period of 4h 39m, clear evidence of mass transfer in the light curve, and the presence of a rapid oscillation at 71.1 seconds. DQ Her in eclipse is very faint (~ 17 mag) so if you can't find it, check the ephemeris. It is an old nova (Nova Her 1934) and hence may be changing as it cools down. We ask that all WET observers follow the same procedures to assure uniformity; these are outlined below.

1. Timing: A leap second will be inserted into Universal Time at midnight on 30 June 1997. Please be sure this has been properly taken into account when you establish the start times of your runs, by checking that the observatory clock you reference has been properly updated.
   
   
2. As usual, we ask that you use no filter in the light path (white light), and an aperture size of 15 arcseconds if this is possible. There is a faint nebula around the target star about this size, or a bit smaller --- probably not visible to the eye even on large telescopes, but we want to include most of its light. A slightly larger aperture is probably OK but a smaller one is not.
   
   
3. Set the integration time to 2 seconds. We recognize that the data files will be large, but not impossibly so. Try to start each run on an even second (0, 2, 4, 6 ...) rather than on an odd one, for easier merging of the runs.
   
   
4. Please use one of the guide stars, marked with a circle on the finding charts, if you can. We have included two of them, at different distances from the target star, to allow for differences in telescope plate scale. Use whichever one you feel will be unvignetted for your instrument.
   
   
5. Please send the data to wet@bullwinkle.as.utexas.edu each night when you finish observing, if you can. You can use email or, if you prefer, annonymous FTP (put the runs into the "incoming" directory).

As before, we'll try to contact you by telephone at your observatory to learn about your weather conditions, and to pass along any questions we may have about your data or procedures. We had rather bad luck with the weather last time, so we expect unusually good weather for this run :-).

ed