[Aavso-photometry] When to submit "Fainter Than" versus actual numbers.

[Brian C. Barnes]

I ran into a situation this weekend that I would like some suggestions on. I
did a sequence on SU TAU, and determined a magnitude of 17.38 w/an error of
1.158. This seems to me like an awfully high error (I normally see errors in
the .1 or .01 range), and the SNR was only 1.2686. After submitting the
data, I wondered if it might not have been better if I had submitted it as
"fainter than the 17.1 COMP star".

At what point do you decide that the data is just not reliable enough to
submit? I guess my thought was that, as long as an accurate error went with
the submission, then giving the exact result of the calculation provided
more information than just a "fainter than" submission would have.

The image consisted of 40 30sec images averaged. I think 30sec was too short
for my setup with a target this dim.

Brian C. Barnes
http://cmfits.atspace.com