A large-scale variability survey for the northern Galactic plane: KISOGP

Abstract

We have conducted a large-scale survey of variable stars in the northern Galactic plane, about 320 square degrees using Kiso Wide Field Camera attached to the 105-cm Schmidt telescope at Kiso observatory. In the KISOGP (KWFC Intensive Survey of the Galactic Plane), we collected 40–100 epoch I-band images between 2012 and 2017. In our survey region roughly 5 million stars exist down to the limiting magnitude of ~16.5 mag in I. In the initial data analysis, we detected a couple of thousands of variable stars including approximately 100 Cepheids and more than 700 Miras. More than 80 percents of them were not previously reported as variable stars, indicating that there are still many relatively bright variables to be found in the Galactic plane.