New variable stars on digitized Moscow collection plates. The field of 66 Ophiuchi

In the course of a program to digitize the astronomical plates of the Sternberg Astronomical Institute’s plate stacks, we are developing algorithms for searching for new variable stars and studying them using digitized photographic plates. We have discovered and studied 480 new variable stars in a 10° × 10° field of view centered on 66 Ophiuchi. The digitized plate negatives used are from the 40-cm astrograph, and are 30 × 30 cm in size. These stars include three new Cepheids of the Galaxy’s spherical component, 157 eclipsing binaries, 11 high-amplitude δ Scuti stars (HADSs), 144 RR Lyrae stars, 110 irregular variables (109 LB and one white star), and 55 semi-regular red variables. New important information has been obtained for 43 known variables, which we have classified and derived or improved their light elements; an erroneous identification of the Mira V404 Oph has been corrected. We have also identified more than 50 suspect brightness variables; a program of CCD observations of these suspected variables has been initiated. Our discoveries of new variable stars were performed in a star field with a large number of known variables, detected earlier photographically or using CCD techniques. The discovery of hundreds of new variables in a well-studied region of sky demonstrates that archive photographs possess a large information potential that has remained unrealized.     

The Western Pacific Working Group of the INQUA Loess Commission: expansion from Central Europe

The INQUA Loess Commission expanded from its Central European base after the 1977 INQUA Congress. The first, furthest, and probably most successful expansion was the Western Pacific Working Group(WPWG). Co-operative loess research between China, Australia and New Zealand demonstrated the ideal working of a dedicated research group within the INQUA protocols. The WPWG functioned from 1978 to about 1988, a critical ten years during which China re-appeared on the world loess scene. The WPWG meeting in China in 1985 was a useful precursor to the INQUA Congress in Beijing in 1991. The main function of the WPWG turned out to be facilitating the return of China to the world of loess scholarship.     

Experience of using a dynamic stochastic approach for solving the problem of very short-range forecasting of state parameters of the atmospheric boundary layer

Discussed are the results of applying a dynamic stochastic method based on the use of the two-dimensional model and the Kalman filtering algorithm for solving the problem of the very short-range (from 0.5 to 6 hours) fore cast of air temperature and orthogonal components of the wind speed in the atmospheric boundary layer realized using the data of radio metric, sodar, and in creased-frequency radiosonde measurements. It is demonstrated that the pro posed technique and the appropriate algorithm give a rather high ac cu racy of very short-range fore casting of temperature and wind within the lead time range under consideration.     

Analytical computation of gravity effects for polyhedral bodies

On the basis of recent analytical results we derive new formulas for computing the gravity effects of polyhedral bodies which are expressed solely as function of the coordinates of the vertices of the relevant faces. We thus prove that such formulas exhibit no singularity whenever the position of the observation point is not aligned with an edge of a face. In the opposite case, the contribution of the edge to the potential to its first-order derivative and to the diagonal entries of the second-order derivative is deemed to be zero on the basis of some claims which still require a rigorous mathematical proof. In contrast with a common statement in the literature, it is proved that only the off-diagonal entries of the second-order derivative of the potential do exhibit a noneliminable singularity when the observation point is aligned with an edge of a face. The analytical provisions on the range of validity of the derived formulas have been fully confirmed by the Matlab $^{\textregistered }$ program which has been coded and thoroughly tested by computing the gravity effects induced by real asteroids at arbitrarily placed observation points.     

New variable stars on digitized plates of the Moscow collection. Field SA9

The new stage of work on digitizing the astronomical plates of the Sternberg Astronomical Institute’s collection and searching for new variable stars using the digitized photographic plates includes a considerable improvement of the automated search techniques for objects with variable brightnesses. In particular, the technique for taking into account the non-linear response of the photographic light detector has been improved. Applying the improved techniques to 182 digitized images of a 10° × 10° field centered at SA9, obtained from scanning photographic plates taken with the Sternberg Astronomical Institute 40-cm astrograph, has enabled the discover and study of 77 new variable stars (MDV 519–595). These include 3 Cepheids, 2 probable BY Draconis stars, 65 eclipsing binaries, 3RR Lyrae stars, 1 high-amplitude δ Scuti star (HADS), and 3 irregular variables. Special CCD observations have confirmed the presence of brightness variations in 7 of the 77 variables that were initially considered uncertain.